Reynaldo Jimenez in Oaxaca, 2007 (Photo: Gabriela Giusti)

To conclude our collaborative series with Palabras Errantes, the Indy profiles the celebrated poet and cultural commentator, Reynaldo Jiménez.

Jiménez was born in Peru in 1959 but has lived in Buenos Aires since 1963. A prolific writer, he has 19 of his own books published, the majority of which are collections of poetry. His work has been included in numerous poetry books and he has been involved in compiling dozens of anthologies. He is deeply involved in the Buenos Aires cultural scene.

He participates in events and festivals across Latin America. He has embraced new media and technology, with a regularly updated blog, facebook page, and youtube channel (oroqolla2) with news, work and interviews from his literary world.

Do you consider yourself an Argentine poet?

I was born in Peru but I don’t consider myself a poet from any place in particular. Before finding out about ‘neologism’ – called such by Deleuze then repeated by many after him – I felt it in my own flesh: deterritorialised. The roots are there however, I can feel them, they move.

Reynaldo Jimenez in Oaxaca, 2007 (Photo: Gabriela Giusti)

How would you describe your poetic style? 

I believe that precision in poetry sometimes needs indirect paths. When a summary tries to explain poetic ideas, it lays them out as something confirmative and self-publicising not as part of the poetic experience which tends to come from the unknown. The concept of a ‘style’ to me seems to restrict the adventure, it’s better to let yourself go with the words and see what happens. They can certainly surprise us. Each type of text asks questions of the form it is written in. I write in search of the impersonal, the latent and the unknown. If I had to appeal to an adjective, I would use: protean.

Are there subjects which come up frequently in your work? 

I don’t deal with subjects. I try to distance myself as far as possible from the school of thought “composition, subject: the cow”, by which I mean I distance myself from the scholarly. I don’t believe in working within the strict boundaries of definitions like realists do. I look for the experiential word; the word which creates itself, that doesn’t rely upon previous realities. Language and reality like an astonished meeting, not in a pre-existing conformity.

How do you feel about poetry translation?

I also translate poems (from Portuguese) – each writer poses his own particular challenges. In the case of transposing my writing to a language which isn’t Spanish, like in English at the moment, it strikes me as very difficult because I work so much with etymological roots; in reality it is something instinctive but it always refers to a particular language. The determined reading planes I lay out in the poems get lost, so in that case, the ideal [for the translation] is a poet who is able to create a sound-associated texture in the second language.

reverse (from sangrado)

Written by Reynaldo Jiménez. Translated by Geoffrey Maguire.

Con los campos en movimiento creamos en el corazón de la materia
Miguel Ángel Bustos

WILL THIS WATERMARK BE THE LOUD
ness that bewilders? on the page-soul
swift palms scatter, releasing fertile lions,
their breath lethal, just to remain on the
savannah: there, further, it cannot be found…

like disturbing low hunger in its lair
among layers that shade does not sharpen
but into the air, bliss surmounts bareback
& like the palm surrenders: drifted delta
between alluvial eyelids spouts, hushes.

will patina be the grace, quartz that hurls
resemblances by hungers-light
for mother Uma, lifted in arms
within the spy space just as water lilies
orbit the mud?

will this eating and fasting be the sphere, spirals
& sweat of each gram-age waiting
just to rage froth that the thorn kept?
separated petals radiate multiparous
wakefulness, & in the respite i restore.

*eating and fasting: Miguel Ángel Bustos

WITHIN HIS FEMALE HE THREADS
—the day burns from gem to yolk
with no command— then the cold
tongue is caught, transbeats

a star the lapse-pool of breath,
the twisting letters consume
more pages, around the time
that slows her passionflower fall.

watching everything does not seep.
does not make hunger nor appease
knowing, or almost an elk in turmoil:
keys brush in the forest, there in the forest

is no respite nor even a spire seems to grow,
unison between altars, brambles, the rose
whose spinal tropism the breath of minute
the shores of sleep pollinates. & shows

the gloomy firefly of hunger &
a flower is conceived in the head,
into the air it turns its petals,
emulsion where sighs find rest,

being every shield it shows lucidity.
arouses the scents of space,
or rather this not-usual instant:
it mistakes voices & sprinkles

its abyssal brush, from well-
polished stone —did you hear,
behind the hidden door,
a single dandelion?— or

awake & with no more steps.
i can see, asleep, how
the shy blossom shows.

AS IF OUTSIDE TO BE LIGHTER
neither night nor dawn, behind
a curtain of birds the brief
phrase from Pan’s flute, while
passing, over there, memory
of what is not yet here.

made to the grace of sound,
jumble of swallowed verbs, the ear
whose reflection allows an orator:
nothing comes through now, woods
creak, no one leaves again.

in its weight the logical inversion,
the ear uproots sculptures
but as a river, denied by other
fiery voices, in its old inebriation,
asleep knowing, to be awake,
unsure to stay up.

impassive reflection, by remote
memento, the golden sound: the ash
tree like the light in which it bathes,
thirst turns us.

the wave of this phrase is veiled,
kiskadee in day’s womb, body
occupied by no one.

*

Photo courtesy of Gabriel Cortinas

In collaboration with Palabras Errantes we continue our four part series of poet profiles with Gabriel Cortiñas.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1983, he currently works as a poet and a literature teacher in primary and secondary schools.

His first book of poetry, ‘Brazadas’, was published in 2007. His second, ‘Hospital de Campaña’, won last year’s international Margarita Hierro poetry prize in Spain.

As well as writing poetry reviews and interviews for various websites he also co-runs the online magazine ‘La Literatura del Pobre’ - a website that encourages poetry exchange between Spain and Argentina.

Have you always wanted to be a writer?

When I was little I didn’t want to be – not that I consider myself a ‘writer’ these days either – but I didn’t dream about being one; I wanted to be a football player like any young boy.

I started writing, more or less, when I was secondary school – I used to write prose, poetry and songs. There wasn’t a moment of revelation when I said to myself, “I want to be a poet” or anything like that.

When you write you feel as if you have got something to say – whether it is valid or not – but you should stop writing when you think you’ve got nothing to say. Right now I do have plenty to say but who knows how it will be in ten years time?

How would you describe your poetic style?

It’s difficult, because I find that when a writer wants to define his aesthetic, either consciously or unconsciously, he ends up putting his foot in it. What I would say is that I don’t write narrative poetry. There is a narrative in what I write, but it’s a hybrid narrative and it plays with broken syntax.

Someone once told me that there are two types of poetry: poetry you read under your breath and poetry you read out loud. I don’t know if I manage it but I try to write poetry that can be read out loud. By this I don’t mean poems that can be read at recitals, I mean poetry that has to do with the outside world, everything that takes place around you,  and the sound of the spoken word. My poetry isn’t all about the ‘me’ and self-reflection, it draws more from the public domain.

I don’t know if I would define it as urban, but everyone writes about what goes on in their lives. What I write about is connected to what goes on in my life, and it is lodged in a certain place and time. I live in a city, I go to work everyday, I travel by bus and that all obviously feeds what I write.

How did you find the process of having your poems translated?

There was a lot of dialogue between me and Chris Schafenacker because the translator’s job isn’t easy.

When you have a narrative poem that tells a story in verse – it might be difficult to capture the sounds and everything but translation is possible. But when you’ve got poetry that breaks the syntax up and jumbles the words around, it gets tricky. That sort of poem requires a translator who is really dedicated to the work.

There was one sentence that was particularly difficult to translate because it played with a local saying. And I told Chris: “Look, what I was trying to say was this, and I did in such a such a way but this is also a specific saying.” And one way or another, he had to find another saying in English that means something similar and incorporate it. At that point it’s not so much a translation as an interpretation – and it was amazing what he did – he had to rewrite it really.

It can be strange reading yourself in another language though, especially when you don’t understand some of the words!

Extract from ‘Hospital de Campaña’

Translation by Chris Schafenacker, courtesy of Palabras Errantes

You can’t make flour out of helmets

they roasted the enemy but ate him raw

his gold tooth burst in their belly

patiently, they ground teeth, picked at them

made tortillas: out of corn, out of rice

tortillas made of potatoes, made of molars.

The tooth’s shine threatens to tear loose

light doesn’t digest in the belly

a sliver that splits the eardrum in four.

If the vanguard doesn’t cover you: the buzz

the explosion. Everyone in their seats

awaiting the start of the fight.

He closes upon the mat like a budding flower

(budding flowers don’t explode)

it is forbidden to wear a watch.

When his father fell in the jungle

he passed on his watch before dying.

He now caresses it under his pillow

will melt it for copper in a pawn shop

his old lady will forgive him

that time no longer exists.

There were still puddles in the street

he opened a window and tossed out something eternal

to be named after the fall,

car, salary, sidewalk: Justice

the third crossbreed dream, crossbreed harmony

—interpret—

—interpret—

the leaves scattered by the after class struggle.

A small mud statue on his bedside table

that he spits on every night

little idol deforms, mutates, day after day

brought it from Tucumán

dressed it as a soldier, prays to it, spits on it

every night:

muddied must red wine saliva

caked on.

Olguín prays to a dead father drowned in saliva

anoints him with a loogie

hawks up seeds, germinated must

wine flowers grow on his face

constantly deformed by water, saliva

prays to him ever night

a thick loogie

myth let loose in formless mud

once seen surrounded by corn, his face

never stopped laughing.

On a mountain

full of carbon full

of oil wells

the Scotsman won’t surrender, continues shooting

like a maniac on high

continues shooting: blistering chickenpox

doesn’t know that his bullets carry an implicit pact

spoken pact inside each bullet

in disbandment retreat one must wait

while the scorched tree grows

the tree bearing fruit wrapped in the pink skin

of the frenulum.

A cows tongue rotting in the sun

is all that’s left to eat

the flies

pick the tongue apart, in the jungle

salt gets at everything: pork jerky

bull jerky, duck jerky, no

ducks are always swimming

in pots of boiling water

duck, parrot, canary, hen

the broth is a blood pact boiling

that chills the corn, the beans, the teeth

salt gets at everything, a cows

tongue rotting in sun

the flies are a part of the deal.

As part of the Indy’s month-long celebration of Argentine literature, we look at the work of Palabras Errantes- a literary translation project that is currently working with previously untranslated Argentine poets.

Cherie Elston, coordinator of Palabras Errantes

The project aims to provide a glimpse into the cutting edge world of contemporary Argentine poetry, while encouraging debate about the merits and challenges of translation.

Working with Palabras Errantes in a collaborative series, the Indy will be bringing you four profiles and four translations over the next four weeks.

Cherie Elston, coordinator of Palabras Errantes, spoke to the Indy about where the idea came from.

The project shares a website with Pulsamerica, an organisation providing weekly updates on Latin American news in English. Cherie explains that both the news site and the literary project emerged from the same desire to get more Latin American content into English language media.

“When Ben (the editor of Pulsamerica) was in Argentina last year, he thought there was so much going on – so much content that will never reach an English language audience,” she says. “We wanted to find a variety of aesthetic styles that otherwise wouldn’t get translated into English.”

The idea is to give an English-speaking audience the opportunity to learn about the depth and complexity of Latin American literature by translating the work of a diverse selection of writers from across the continent.

This goal extends to include writers who might be overlooked by the bigger publishing houses: “I find it frustrating when you look at the same old stuff produced by the major publishers and they perpetuate stereotypes on certain discourses on Latin America,” says Cherie. “It would be interesting to look at different texts being produced and not just texts that look at violence, for example.”

Last year, Palabras Errantes translated the work of female Uruguayan writers and presented the work.

Argentina is the second country Palabras Errantes has worked with. Last year the project translated the work of female Uruguayan writers, which is now being turned into an e-book for free download. This year they turned their attention to Argentine poetry.

The process seems simple: Cherie searches out interesting writers from around the country, engages in a dialogue with them and, with the help of professional volunteers, translates their work and publishes it on Palabras Errantes’ website.

“The problem with the Argentine project was that there are too many poets!” she explains. Unlike the previous project, which involved selecting writers from a relatively small pool, this time around they had to deal with an abundance of poets on the Argentine scene. “There’s an awful lot going on with poetry in Argentina,” she adds.

The network of writers she works with has grown, and continues to grow, through word of mouth. Faced with the challenge of penetrating literary circles from across the Atlantic, Cherie relies on recommendations from the few contacts she started with in order to cast the net as wide as possible.

“Every time I contact a writer I ask them to recommend other writers,” she says. And inevitably some people recommend friends or acquaintances but eventually, as more and more people get involved, the network grows and enough writers of merit emerge.

Palabras Errantes logo

“This project isn’t defining the Argentine scene,” she stresses, “it’s simply showcasing some of the writers who are working there. What I wanted to do was show the variety of styles coming out of contemporary Argentine poetry.”

Since the project is one of translation, finding the writers is only the first step- translating the work comes next – and translating poetry is no mean feat. It involves getting to the core of what language really is. When you write a poem, you use words as imprecise building blocks – you paint a picture, convey an idea and provoke an emotional response.

When you translate a poem, it’s not necessarily the words themselves that you have to capture, but the underlying image or idea. The translators need to have a strong understanding of the nuances of both languages, but they also need to be able to think and write like a poet in the English language first.

Cherie accepts that in translation there will always be a sacrifice but warns that in poetry the sacrifice is all the more evident. “If you are trying to capture a concept, an image, a metaphor, a rhythm and a rhyme, something will inevitably be lost. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing to be gained,” she says. The aim of projects like Palabras Errantes is to make the transition between one language and the other as seamless as possible.

The poets selected for translation by the Palabras Errantes project will be gradually published on their site over the coming weeks. We begin the ‘Palabras Errantes: Poet Profiles’ series with a profile of the poet Mercedes Araujo and an accompanying translation from her poem ‘The life of butterflies’.

¡Basta Ya De Prosa! exhibit at OSDE in microcentro. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

‘That’s enough prose!’ might sound like a byline from a hackneyed modernist manifesto, but there’s nothing stockpiled about this inventively curated exhibition, which marks the 25th anniversary of Diario de Poesía, one of Argentina’s most prestigious literary publications.

Founded by the poet and translator Daniel Samoilovich in 1986, the journal emerged against the backdrop of cultural and political discontent that marked the tail end of the military dictatorship.

In retrospect, its success was unsurprising. The journal filled the creative vacuum that materialised during years of heavy censorship and swiftly gained a reputation as an iconic artistic forum, instrumental in injecting the art world with the thrilling momentum of experimentation and collaboration.

Modelled on San Francisco’s beat magazine, ‘Poetry Flash’, it strove to cut a fine balance between international poets and prodigious homegrown talent such as Juan L.Ortiz and Arnaldo Calveyra. Its first edition set the benchmark with beat poet Allen Ginsberg, and it has remained at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde scene ever since.

Translation has long been the magazine’s trademark, with first and definitive translations by Samoilovich and Mirta Rosenberg, providing a platform for Argentine readers of poets such as Seamus Heaney, Paul Celan and Lee Harwood.

But unlike the coterie spirit fostered by most literary publications, attracting the masses through a tabloid-style and popular modes of circulation was integral to the paper’s conception.

Radically removing poetry from its elevation and obscurity as the manna of the elite, Diario de Poesía made a case for poetry as a spontaneous extension of mainstream, popular culture. Brazen vanguard headlines are tempered, for example, by an image of Patti Smith; a Philip Larkin poem features alongside lyrics by Tom Waits.

Whilst anniversary shows can run the risk of alienating the casual visitor by presenting an exhaustive anthology, this exhibition – curated by Viviana Usubiaga – radiates in its scale and ambition. By honing in on sketches and photographs created specifically for the quarterly editions, it charts the journal’s pivotal role in fostering an ongoing dialogue between poets and visual artists.

“The work of a painter, so comparable, so close in substance to the work of a poet’s,” Edgar Bayley wrote in the 11th issue of Diario de Poesía, “isn’t it that which keeps us continually alert, awake, attentive?”

No one fostered this cross-fertilization of the arts more fervently than the journal’s artistic directors Eduardo Stupía and Juan Pablo Renzi . The later’s graphic print ‘Boy Out of Window’ and trompe l’oeil oil ‘Interior with a tablecloth’ are among the highlights of the show.

Renzi, who died in 1992, was responsible for the classic, versatile five-column format which still adorns the magazine’s cover today, and he didn’t rest there. For Renzi, the idea of form was intricately bound up with content: typography and print are thus meticulously manipulated to reflect the tone of the work.

25 years of Diario de Poesia (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

With its collage-like layout, the paper celebrates the suggestive, unexpected, and often humourous connections that arise between text and image. Breaking down cultural hierarchies and championing a democratic mode of art, poetry is seen as a process of exchange and interaction rather than as a static entity.

The ‘Artist Pages’, a staple section of the paper, feature everything from a delightful series of cartoony graphic prints, accompanied by overviews of the artists’ work, to comic strips and reproductions of iconic paintings.

Highlights include León Ferrari’s provocative interpretation of Angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary, ‘The Gospel According to Matthew’, and Guillermo Kuitca’s deceptively simple modern-day Atlas, ‘The Weight of the World’.

Valentina Rebasa holds her ground on the photographic end with a furtive series of prints of women, all of whom bear a remarkable similarity to the artist. The traditional concept of the self-portrait is thus radically reconfigured in Rebasa’s ‘other-portrait’, in which the self comes to be seen as a construct of others.

Poetry has its cameo part to play in film too, with screenings from the classics ‘Apocalypse Now’, ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’. Incorporating a poem into a film’s flow has the effect of slowing down its tempo – the automatism of the cinematic image is momentarily confronted by the ‘other’ historical time frame of the poem, allowing its lines to echo subtly through the main plot.

Gathering Joseph Cornell’s ‘found footage’, Kurt Schwitter’s sound poems and the nonsense lyrics of Edward Lear under one roof, the exhibition is testimony to the endless inventiveness of the poetic form, and to the ever-fertile dialogue that Diario de Poesía continues to sponsor between artists and poets.

I met Ezequiel Zaidenwerg in August, 2008. I was spending a semester in Buenos Aires as an undergraduate exchange student and he was teaching a seminar on poetry translation. At the time, I harbored vague, earnest, poetic (in the pejorative sense) notions of what the process of translation was—in fact, I’m pretty sure I didn’t even think of it as a “process.”

Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, poet and translator (Photo: Valentina Siniego)

So, it came as a surprise when Ezequiel briskly set out, in the early minutes of Day One, to give us a crash course in poetic meter. The first thing I learned from him was the word “heptasyllable.” As Ezequiel presented it, translation involved a tireless kind of imagination, but one that necessarily operated within an elegant structure; it involved, for that matter, structure. You had to be a cover artist, not a composer. And you needed chops. So, first order of business: scales.

For a while, I wasn’t quite sure how I felt about all this. But I came around. And as I got to know Ezequiel, as a professor and later as a friend, my enthusiasm for translation continued to grow.

When Ezequiel and I coincided in Mexico City—the city where I currently live and which is threatening to adopt Ezequiel—we decided to collaborate on the translation of several of his new poems. These poems, taken from his second book, ‘La lírica está muerta’ (Lyric Poetry is Dead, 2011), display his fierce poetic intelligence, both sprawling and precise, and his vast and focused imagination: his language, equal parts learned and off-the-cuff, manages to praise and problematize both our current (literary, cultural and political) moment and the legacies that have borne it out.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1981, Ezequiel has published one other collection of poetry—’Doxa’ (2007)—and two collections as translator: ‘Me va a encantar el siglo XXI’ (2011), poems by Mark Strand, and ‘El club del crimen’ (forthcoming), poems by Weldon Kees. He also maintains the celebrated poetry translation blog, zaidenwerg.blogspot.com, where he publishes poems newly rendered in Spanish twice a week.

In the following conversation, conducted during our time in the Mexican capital, we discussed topics of great poetic importance including, but not limited to: inspiration, freedom, Lorca and monsters.

Can you talk a bit about your most recent book, ‘La lírica está muerta’ [‘Lyric Poetry is Dead’], in terms of what prompted you to write it, how it came to be, how it’s structured?

I started writing ‘Lyric Poetry is Dead’ when I was 24 as a kind of invective against my elders. However, the project kept expanding, and, as it expanded, I myself continued to grow and change my ideas about poetry. The statement “Lyric poetry is dead” is an (ironic) quote from an Argentine poet, Alejandro Rubio, of the generation before mine, who, in an ars poetica included in the anthology ‘Monstruos’ [Monsters] that collected poets from the ‘90s, made this provocative declaration.

My initial proposal was to refute it; that said, as time went on, the book’s agenda ceased to be a defence of lyric poetry (which, in any case, doesn’t need my help or anyone else’s) and instead became an elegy for the loss of the idea of transcendence through poetry. In some way or other, the book’s thesis is that lyric poetry is a zombie — dead from the start, but continually reviving and reincarnating itself in order to terrorise us (or question us). As for its structure, it’s a unitary poem divided into thirteen narrative vignettes; in each one, lyric poetry is personified by a famous cadaver from recent Argentine history or the history of literature. As a kind of coda, the book concludes with a poem called “What Love Does Unto Poets,” which doesn’t strictly belong to the previous series, but which is intimately connected to it.

How do you think ‘Lyric Poetry is Dead’ most strikingly differs from your previous (and first) book, ‘Doxa’? To put it more broadly, what are some of the ways in which you feel you have “evolved” as a poet?

I wouldn’t know how to say whether I’ve evolved as a poet, or even if I’m really a poet, or what it means exactly to be one. Apart from that, I think that ‘Doxa’, my previous book, with the exception of the homonymous poem, was rather, on the one hand, a metrical exercise, and on the other hand an attempt to cloud the waters so that they’d appear more profound, to appropriate Nietzsche’s metaphor. Additionally, there was a conscious mission on my part to create radically different books, which has to do with trying not to fall into the comfort zones in which those who write poetry and sustain this foolish passion over the long term often fall. I firmly believe that, more than writing against tradition or against other poets, one writes against oneself.

Do you find yourself repeatedly revisiting particular “terrain” — certain subjects that continue to fascinate you, individual ideas or images, styles or forms you’re attracted to or comfortable with — over time? In other words, are there recurring motifs, or even recurring obsessions, in your work?

I suppose so. I think one (very) weak point in my poetry is the scarcity of physical images. Unfortunately, my poetic sensibility is eminently linguistic, so my poems tend to be constructed, almost without exception, from ideas (to be clear, let’s say that all have some kind of thesis); in addition, I think that what gives them poetic density, if indeed they have it, is the search for verbal imagination. Consequently, I suppose some of the elements that recur in my poems are humor, or at least a certain kind of sarcasm or irony; the mix of references from different cultural registers; and an almost unhealthy obsession with meter.

(Photo: Valentina Siniego)

Both your poetry and your translations are always written in meter. Why? Can you describe the importance of meter as you see it?

I can’t say (although I’d certainly like to) that metered poetry is better than unmetered poetry. There are abundant examples to prove it. However, for me personally, the use of more or less established metric schemes allows me to organise myself when I write; I believe, like Luis Cernuda, that freedom isn’t of this world, and I find it impossible to write amid the chaos constituted by total boundlessness. I think that, in the field of the arts, formal limitations don’t pose a restriction, but rather a condition of possibility.

Your blog of poetry translations, zaidenwerg.blogspot.com, is widely read and respected. What has the experience of maintaining this blog been like for you — both as a translator, period, and as a kind of “messenger” among various audiences and contexts?

Well, to tell the truth, I owe the entirety of my meager literary career to the blog. Although, perhaps rightfully, I’m known almost exclusively as a translator, posting some of my poems on the blog has helped give my poetry some visibility. With respect to the experience of maintaining it, this year will mark its seventh anniversary, and the third anniversary of its religious twice-weekly updates. I should confess that there have been moments of great enthusiasm and others in which, amid the tumult of life, only my sense of duty has prevented me from abandoning the routine of publication.

As for my responsibility to the public, I don’t consider myself a “messenger” of anything. The blog was born in a period of time when I found it completely impossible to write a poem of my own, and translation helped me stay in contact with the “kitchen” of poetry. I never thought of diffusion as my objective, nor am I interested in upholding the tabernacle of the “original” as something inviolate. About the translator’s role, my creed is effectively platonic: I believe in a kind of platonic

heaven of poetry, where poems exist separately from the particular linguistic embodiment dictated by the original; the translator’s job consists of seeing those ideal forms and adapting them to the conditions of production in the given language and the context in which the translation is carried out.

What is the relationship between your work as a translator and your own writing? Do these roles directly inform each other somehow?

Yes, obviously. I suppose that the fact of writing poetry and possessing a certain technical repertoire helps me connect a little better with that platonic heaven I mentioned before. As for the second part of the question, I hope that translating such diverse poems by such distinct poets has allowed me to enrich my arsenal of poetic methods.

Poetry, like any art, strikes me as a strange social beast. On the one hand, it’s intensely solitary by nature. On the other hand, people make a lot of noise about different kinds of literary “scenes,” which of course vary by place: readings, workshops, festivals, university programs, etc. How much literary “community” — formal or informal — do you need, or do you feel comfortable with? What is the relationship between solitude and collectivity like for you?

The poetry world, like all professional communities, is contemptible by nature. It’s full of hypocrisy, envy, and resentment. However, I don’t harbor the childish illusion of being able to change it: I participate, since in order to be a writer it’s necessary to disseminate what you write, but I don’t take it too seriously. I do believe in the fundamental importance of having interlocutors one respects and hopefully admires, and fortunately I have a small group of this kind. I should also mention that it’s difficult for me to feel comfortable in the context of Argentine poetry, given that I generally don’t have anything in common with the conception of poetry that many of my compatriots tend to have, especially when it comes to the technical dimension. Strangely (or not), I’ve found in other Latin American countries, above all in Mexico, a group of poets whose work, poetic and theoretical, inspires and nourishes me.

Could you tell us some of the poets — or poems — that have been most important to you over time?

I discovered poetry when I was 15, when my high school literature professor brought a poem to class by Federico García Lorca, “Oficina y denuncia” [“Office and Denunciation”], which is part of his book Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], and it made me see that there was something fascinating there, radically different from prose, which until that time I had read avidly and attempted to write. Later I discovered by chance, on the cover of a now-discontinued Argentine literary journal, a poem by Oliverio Girondo, ‘La mezcla’(The Mixture) from ‘En la masmédula’ (In the Masmédula). I didn’t know it yet, but what fascinated me about Girondo’s poem, more than his syntax and verbal experiments, was his incantatory use of rhythm. Some time later, when I bought my copy of ‘Trilce’, the incredibly famous and also experimental collection by César Vallejo, I completed my first trinity of books that inspired in me the desire to read and write poetry.

The second and more lasting revelation took place a few years after that, when I set out to read the authors of the Spanish Golden Age, from whom I finally learned classical technique. In sum, I’d say that my trajectory has gone from the avant-garde, or rather from experimental poetry (one couldn’t say that Lorca, Girondo, or Vallejo are truly avant-garde poets), toward a certain classicisim. More authors would come later, many of them from the US, whom I came to know intimately through translating them, as well as many others in my own language. In any case, as time went on, I went from thinking of poetry in terms of poets to beginning to think of it instead in terms of poems: in this sense, I firmly believe that poetry is a collective creation, a gathering of poems rather than poets; it’s for this reason that even those considered “great authors” leave only a handful of poems to posterity.

[I] On Civil War

Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, author of "Lyric Poetry is Dead" (Photo: Valentina Siniego)

Lyric poetry is dead. At last.

The moment that we’ve all been waiting for has come.

Now we can unequivocally say
an era has concluded. The splendid order of the centuries
is being newly shuffled, freshly founded.

An iron child is born for poetry,
and with his advent, through the resignation of the ancient golden lineage,
a steely progeny shall rise up
in its place: in any case, it’s time
for us to sing
of more important matters.

An iron child is born
for poetry, and the horizon darkens with a sole unknown:
Will his parents smile tenderly upon him?
Will bitter laughter overcome them?
Will he view them with scorn? Or with suspicion? Perhaps
what’s worse: will he repay his life and their support
with an indifferent face?

Lyric poetry
is dead. And so it is, although her death
–whether the ones who now take credit for it like it or not–
occurred unceremoniously:
as a tree falls, a nameless trunk amid deep woods
that no one passes through,
she fell. Technique was also lacking:
the cross’s shoddy planks,
the rusty nails, the crown entwined with thorns,
the vinegar-soaked cloth a human hand
with rudimentary skill once warped
–they played no part in the affair,
which had no witnesses, no exemplary punishment,
and came to pass with little forethought,
leaving no mark.

She’s dead. And so it is.

And so a savage destiny sweeps up
the poets and the crime of fratricide,
as of the moment when her blood was spilled,
like a curse on her heirs,
upon the earth:
it happened on a piece of open ground; the blow
surprised her from behind.

She’s dead.

Lyric poetry is dead.

She didn’t die like Christ; they murdered her
like Abel.

[2] Sodom and Gomorrah

Lyric poetry is dead.

And though I pleaded
many times for God to kill her
and end my suffering,
I now remember her with bittersweet
nostalgia.

It happened many years ago:
tired of the chaos of the city,
I fled the Capital and took my family
to a small village, isolated in the middle
of the prairie.

The early months
passed happily, unhurried,
among the lethargy of work,
domestic life, and the continual
siestas.

On weekend afternoons,
we’d go to walk around the park
and nod our heads in greeting, always
to the same drowsy faces
whose eyes would brighten only
if someone shared a bit of gossip
with superficial malice.

My sons –as was
expected– were the first
to grow accustomed to that life: they quickly
struck up friendships with the locals,
mingling so closely they could almost be
mistaken for each other, amid the banter
over beer, cars, football, women. As for the others
–my wife, my daughters, and myself–
the adjustment was a bit more difficult,
despite the mildness of the climate,
except for the humidity.

In any
case, such tranquil days
would have to end eventually:
in early autumn, I began to notice
that, underneath the weary plainness
of that provincial folk, there lay concealed
a deviance I wouldn’t want
to find myself required to detail.

And so
our mutual distrust took root;
at first, from our side only,
but it didn’t take them long
to notice it: a slant about the smile,
a lowering of the gaze
in greeting.

As months went on
and days grew shorter,
the strain grew stronger, though
it wouldn’t openly reveal itself
until the winter.

It was
a night of bitter cold. By chance,
some relatives had come to visit
from the city. All seated
at the table, we were sharing
the meat, the bread, the wine, and suddenly
we heard a knock at the front door: we opened it
to find the entire town outside,
assembled at our entrance.

One of the neighbors, who appeared to be
the leader of the angry
mob, demanded:

“Where are
the ones who came tonight to see you?
Bring them, so we can meet them.”

I left the house and closed the door behind me
and begged them all to leave,
but they just sneered:

“And did you really think
that you could come here from the city
to tell us what to do?”

My daughters, seeing
that my efforts were in vain,
leaned out the door and offered,
in exchange for leaving us alone,
to go with them, but even so
they would not be persuaded.

Within the house, my relatives reached out
their hands and, pulling me inside again, closed
the door tightly.

Meanwhile, outside, the townspeople
attempted to tear it down; and others
clutched the metal bars protecting
the windows, making faces
and threatening gestures; they would have
taken us as prisoners, or maybe
something worse, if the unexpected
hadn’t then occurred:
a midnight sun
all of a sudden rose above the plains,
and it was day. Dazzled,
the rabble paused a moment
in their violence; a gentle rain
began to fall,
and from inside we saw the people
raising their hands, receiving it
with joy, and then they started, one by one,
to shed the clothing on their
backs.

And so, the men with naked
torsos, the women in their bras,
they suddenly began to dance
despite the intensifying rain,
although there was no music. The steam
fogged up the windows more
and more, until we could see
nothing from inside. The light
outside appeared to strengthen
and then we felt abruptly that the heat
was rising faster:
we watched enormous raindrops
run down the windowpanes, now clouded over,
our bodies drenched in sweat;
meanwhile, the rain resounded, making it
impossible for any sound
outside to reach us.

All this continued for an hour, an hour and a half.

And then we felt the heat begin to drop,
and all at once the lights went out.

I opened the door hesitantly;
an icy wind struck hard. I found my coat
and stepped into the night, dimly illuminated
by the moon: upon the site
where, moments earlier, had stood a town,
I saw a field of ashes
and the soil itself gave off
a vaguely sweet aroma.

Without delay,
I gathered up my family and we set out,
not really knowing where we’d go;
once we had left behind, at last,
those devastated bounds
that had contained the village, my wife
looked back; with teary eyes
and faltering voice,
she said to me:
“The smoke is rising from the ground
as from an oven.”

Seeing her stiff,
I struck her hard
to force her to react.

We reached the road
soon after and we followed it,
walking for several hours,
until at last we could make out
the poorly lighted sign of a gas station.

From there we used the phone to call for help
from other relatives, who came
by noon to rescue us; so
we commenced our journey to the city,
from which we’d never move
again.

Time passed. And with its passing,
habit
did its work: resentment toward
the prior horror soon became forgetfulness;
forgetfulness submitted to the daily chores
of wanting what was missing, which consumed
my days.

And yet, I’m often wakened
in the night by the distressing sense
that they, the people of the town, were acting
to defend some kind of love exactly like
my own, and I’m tormented by the certainty
that it was all for nothing:
renouncing
both the others and ourselves,
to keep on living
just like always,
just
like in any other place.

[3] Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna

Lyric poetry is dead.

In that one photograph
that went around the world, the strangest company
encircles the cadaver: three
civilians (two observe it, curious, while the third
averts his eyes); a pair of soldiers
with frightened faces; one photographer,
back to the camera, with three quarters of his body
out of the frame; and two
officials dressed in ornamented uniforms:
one glances to the camera pointed at him
while he supports the lifeless head,
posed like a hunter with his trophy;
the other, who appears of higher rank,
points with his right-hand index finger
to where the heart had beat,
as if he could revive it with his touch.

With open eyes and a clear stare,
the body seems like it could rise, a Lazarus
returned to life for just an instant,
if only to sink back at once
in death.

Lyric poetry is dead.

And I imagine
what they’ll be saying, those who had believed in her
to justify it
(the same as always):
that she was not herself the light,
that she came only as a witness to the light;
and that she came to that which was her own,
and yet her own did not receive her.

What’s certain is, it went like this:
we captured her at dawn,
maimed by a bullet in the leg
after an ambush that had lasted
from noon till late,
the night far gone.

In those conditions, even so,
—not just the leg; the asthma too, oppressing
the lungs—, she’d persevered in combat,
until her rifle was destroyed completely
after a shot that crushed the barrel;
in any case, the pistol’s magazine
was empty.

Moved to the barracks
(which used to be a school), to be interrogated,
she said beauty was patience
and spoke of lilies—what
are lilies like? I’ve never seen one—,
which, in the field,
after so many nights under the earth,
break through one day
from straight green stalk to white corolla.

But here, in these parts,
everything grows chaotically and without purpose,
and I, who came to the world and grew up
ferociously, against and then despite it all,
like grass that struggles up between the pavement cracks,
flattened by passing cars—but here
the roads aren’t paved, and there are hardly any cars—,
I couldn’t understand that she, delivered into everything,
her parents’ own investment in the future
—and time, to her, was like an arrow moving deliberately
toward its conclusion, while to me it was a sequence regulated
not by the urgency of longing, nor the instinct’s deaf impressions,
but rather something sacred, though remote—;
I couldn’t understand how she’d abandon
what she had left behind (the aimlessness
of comfortable existence, or perhaps an excess
of arbitration?) to come to this wilderness
where everything can grow,
but only hunger thrives,
to go in circles, and to witness how her comrades fell
one by one, in combat with an adversary
innumerable in its members
and their invisible divisions,
battling for the triumphant glory
of an Idea: we, born here
in this wild place,
where nature still
exists distinctly from the will of man,
learn early in our lives that liberty
is never of this world, and love
is act, not potency.

But I said nothing.

And then there was a silence:
while we interrogated her, we heard
the charge to kill her. (Whatever happened to her hands
was after she had died. I didn’t see it. I even heard
about an order to cut off her head,
which was defied.)

Some hours passed.

A captain told us we should wait
in case there were a counter-order,
which never came (the radio already informing of her death).

Midday arrived. We had to kill her.

And as for how the facts were given,
it isn’t true: that we could hardly bear it,
and so we drank to give us courage,
and even then we couldn’t.

We simply did
what they had ordered us to do:
we went into the room where we were keeping her
and killed her as you’d kill an animal
that you had raised to eat.

Angela Pradelli (Photo: Tony Valdez)

Ángela Pradelli was born in Buenos Aires in 1959. As a professor and teacher, she heads the Plan Provincial de Lectura that helps institute and promote reading education in the Province of Buenos Aires. As a writer, she’s published stories, poems and essays in various newspapers and anthologies. She is the author of five award-winning novels: ‘Las cosas ocultas’ (1996), ‘Amigas mías’ (2002), ‘Turdera’ (2003), ‘El lugar del padre’ (2004) and ‘Combi’ (2008). A book of poetry, ‘Un dia entero’, appeared in 2008 and a collection of essays, ‘La busqueda del lenguaje’, came out earlier this year.

‘Amigas mías’, which we’ve excerpted here in its first-ever translation into English (executed by the masterful Andrea G. Labinger), won the Premio Emecé de Novela in 2002. Pradelli also received First Prize in the Inter-American Story Contest run by the Fundación Avón in 1999 and the Premio Clarín de Novela in 2004. She spoke to us via e-mail from her home outside Buenos Aires to tell us a bit about her fiction, her fascination for small spaces, and what was inspiring about her old commute.

Your story is actually part of a novel. Can you tell us a bit about the larger work and how this excerpt fits into it?

‘Amigas mías’ (My Friends) tells the stories of four women who have known each other since childhood and have shared experiences that, over the years, have deeply impacted their lives in many ways. Together, they traverse not just childhood, but also adolescence–a special moment in our lives when, like at birth, many worlds open before us, we create new universes and we lose ourselves in an intense self-examination that never really is repeated in adulthood. As they grow up, the friends go their separate ways, but to keep their friendship alive decide on a ritual. Every year, no matter what happens, they get together on December 30th, just the four of them, no husbands, no boyfriends, no kids, and celebrate. No sadness, no nostalgia, they get together to enjoy themselves. The excerpt published here is a story that one of the women experiences without the company of the others. It´s set on a train, where she witnesses a situation that perturbs her. However, in her reaction, we see something of our human complexity: it´s probably far from the reaction you´d expect from an average person.

We´d like to give our readers an idea of who you are as a writer. This isn´t your first book. How many have you written? How does this book differ from or continue the aims of the rest of your work?

I began writing poetry. Poetry, as a genre of writing, has a very different dimension. In 2008, I published a collection of poems, ‘Un día entero’, that I had been writing for more than ten years. But poetry exists in its own time, I could spent ten years working on a book of poems just a few pages long. After I began as a poet, I wrote a book of stories that, in reality, was the first book I published, since aside from a few stand-alone poems in anthologies, I didn’t published any collected poetry before 2008.

The writing of ‘Amigas mías’ was a great joy for me and a great learning experience. I lived for almost six years–the time it took to write the book–with the characters, their ghosts, their frustrations, their wishes. Afterwards, I wrote other novels, and another book of poetry that I´m working on right now, and two books of essays. Into each of the subsequent novels I incorporate one character from each of the previous novels. Perhaps partly because I refuse to accept the idea that characters die after the last page of the book.

In ´The Train Robber,´ the main character sees a criminal act but doesn´t denounce it. What is it about the act that interests Olga, the protagonist? Is her reaction a comment on crime, or the way we accept it in our midst? Or something else altogether?

I live 20km from Buenos Aires, and the commute on the train was a something I made frequently over many years. I especially like small set pieces; to me, everything has more power in an intimate scene. I’m fascinated, for example, by hallways of intensive care units, by kitchens, by waiting rooms, by gardens when they’re small. The traincar is one of those small scenes where so many things happen. On top of that, most of the time, people in traincars don’t know each other, and yet they share a certain complicity born of the situation–the trip, the transport. And if this story can be said to take off from a moment of crime, after that moment, it clearly goes in another direction. Which, as you point out, is not the direction of denouncing the perpetrator.

The protagonist, through this experience, comes to know something about herself that she hadn’t known before and that she wouldn’t ever have guessed at. I love writing characters who go through certain experiences and come out changed somehow. And I love, as a writer, when in some way I can show this change, even if it’s small, as something permanent, for forever.

Read ‘The Train Robber‘ an excerpt from Ángela Pradelli’s award-winning novel ‘Amigas mías’, translated into English by Andrea G. Labinger, exclusively for The Argentina Independent.

Lead Image: Tren es progreso by Federico Casares