La paciencia de Bolaño

TAL CUAL LUNES 9 DE JULIO DE 2001

                                    [Foto: http://www.enriquevilamatas.com/]

CULTURA

La paciencia de Bolaño

Con esta misiva, el narrador chileno Roberto Bolaño, invitado como miembro del jurado para el premio Rómulo Gallegos, da testimonio de su contundente deslinde con el Celarg y su presidente

Roberto Bolaño

"Se los pueden meter por el culo", dijo en referencia a sus honorarios como jurado el autor de Los detectives salvajes, novela ganadora de la pasada edición del premio

Por motivos de salud no pude viajar a Caracas. Mi ausencia física no significa, sin embargo, que dé carta blanca al jurado para decidir por mí. Las declaraciones del presidente del Celarg, cuya persona y nombre desconozco, ya eran motivos más que suficientes, al menos en lo que a mí respecta, para acudir, por lo menos, con una cierta reserva a mi cita en Caracas. La aparición posterior de rumores del tipo de que yo no he viajado a Venezuela porque el Celarg se negó a pagarle el pasaje a mi mujer e hijo, que más que un rumor es una calumnia o una difamación, y que en otra circunstancia sólo me haría reír, no hace sino agrandar las reservas del caso. Entre paréntesis tengo que decir que si alguien debe dinero a alguien es el Celarg a mí: tres mil dólares por haberme leído más de 250 libros y que en lo que a mí respecta, por descontado, se los pueden meter por el culo. Tal cual. Mi paciencia frente a los neostalinistas (o frente a los mafiosillos o frente a los estómagos agradecidos) no es grande. Así que aclaremos de una vez por todas que gane quien gane, sea una buena o una mala novela, nada tiene que ver con mi criterio como lector, por la sencilla razón de que mi opinión jamás ha sido pedida ni la de ellos confrontada conmigo. Mi desvinculación con el jurado es total. El Celarg miente cuando coloca mi nombre al frente de las listas sucesivas de finalistas. Nada he tenido que ver con esa decisión. El jurado del actual premio Rómulo Gallegos está integrado por cuatro personas, no por cinco. Los comisarios neostalinistas dirán mañana cosas peores, pues tal es su oficio, pero si mi no participación en el premio queda suficientemente aclarada, lo que digan sólo provocará mi risa.

Roberto Bolaño

Me alegro que haya ganado Vila-Matas. Aun así espero que en Caracas quede claro que yo nada he tenido que ver con esta decisión, que me parece buena, pero que, según soplara el viento, hubiera podido ser muy mala. Tal como lo decía en mi nota: la responsabilidad en la elección, acertada o desacertada, no me atañe en lo más mínimo.


(Texto originalmente publicado en versión papel y digital del periódico caraqueño Tal Cual)

Bolaño’s Patience

With this letter, the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño, invited to be a member of the jury for the 2001 Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in Caracas, Venezuela, provides his blunt disassociation from the Rómulo Gallegos Center for Latin American Studies (CELARG) and its president.

                  [Photo taken from: http://www.enriquevilamatas.com/]

Due to health reasons I couldn’t travel to Caracas. My physical absence doesn’t mean, however, that I gave the jury carte blanche to decide for me. The declarations by the president of the CELARG, whose name and person are unknown to me, were already more than enough reason, at least as far as I’m concerned, for me to attend my appointment in Caracas, at the very least, with a sense of apprehension. The emergence later of rumors of the type such as that I haven’t travelled to Venezuela because the CELARG refused to pay the plane fare for my wife and son, which more than a rumor is slander or defamation, and in other circumstances would have merely made me laugh, simply increases my doubts regarding this case. As a parenthesis I have to say that if anyone owes someone money it’s the CELARG to me: three thousand dollars for having read 250 books, and as far as I’m concerned, needless to say, they can shove it up their ass. Just like that. I don't have much patience for Neo-Stalinists (or pseudo gangsters or corrupt functionaries). So let’s clear this up once an for all, no matter who wins, whether it’s a good or bad novel, it has nothing to do with my criteria as a reader, for the simple reason that my opinion has never been sought and it has never been in confrontation with the rest of the judges. My disassociation from the judges is total. The CELARG lies when it places my name in front of the successive lists of finalists. I haven’t had anything to do with that decision. There are four judges for the current Rómulo Gallegos Prize, not five. The Neo-Stalinist commissaries will surely say much worse things tomorrow, because that’s their job, but if my non-participation in the prize is made sufficiently clear, whatever they might say will merely provoke my laughter.

Roberto Bolaño


Addendum
I’m happy that Enrique Vila-Matas has won. Regardless, I still hope it’s clear for those in Caracas that I haven’t had anything to do with this decision, which seems good to me, but which, according to how the wind might have blown, could have been very bad. Just like I said in my note: the responsibility of the selection, correct or mistaken, has absolutely nothing to do with me.




{ Roberto Bolaño, Tal Cual, 9 July 2001 }

Nota de contraportada para Los detectives salvajes de Roberto Bolaño / Carlos Noguera

Blurb for Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives

The first thing it corresponds us to presage in relation to The Savage Detectives is the passion with which the reader will succumb to its prodigious fictional seduction. Sequence after sequence, the plot that unfolds in an arc of twenty years and four continents hurls us into a vertigo and a pleasure similar to that of the great adventure sagas that have frequented the best literature of all times.

The story told gathers its base in the labyrinth of a double search. On one hand we are told about the investigation undertaken by two young poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, on the trail of the precursor of the artistic ideology they profess: the poet Cesárea Tinajero, who disappeared during the years immediately after the Mexican revolution, along with a few foundational documents that she authored. On the other, we are witnesses to an inquiry into the true identity of the protagonists by the anonymous voice (also belonging to the reader) that crosses the profuse second part of the volume and that extends for 20 years (1976-1996) and in diverse settings (Mexico, Nicaragua, Israel, Spain, France, Africa). Arturo and Ulises pursue the illusion of Cesárea; the reader pursues the illusion of Arturo and Ulises. The double framework, however, when it is superimposed, unravels the multiple symbolic core that underlies the search.

But the narrative fluidity, the anecdotal waterfall, the sharp humor and the breath of adventure should not be seen as an analogy for the simplification of the product or its trivialization. The technique brandished by the author to present his protagonists, for example, consists in being able to render the protagonists in such a manner that they turn out to be unreachable for the reader, who, notwithstanding, never loses the sensation of always being “just about to” catch them.




Translator’s note: Venezuelan novelist Carlos Noguera (1943) was on the jury that awarded Bolaño the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize in Caracas in 1999. This blurb was written for the Venezuelan edition of The Savage Detectives, published by Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana in 1999.




{ Carlos Noguera, 1999 }

Roberto Bolaño: Hay que mantener la ficción en favor de la conjetura / Eduardo Cobos

Roberto Bolaño: One Must Maintain Fiction in Favor of Conjecture

Roberto Bolaño and Eduardo Cobos at the entrance of the Hotel Ávila in Caracas, 1999. Photograph: Lisbeth Salas.

Editor’s Note
July 15 marked ten years since the death of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. In 1999, when his reputation was beginning to acquire the delirious dimensions of his particular condition of literary auteur and editorial success, he visited Venezuela to receive the Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives. This interview was previously published by its author, the journalist Eduardo Cobos, in the magazine Mezclaje, which he edited at the time with Anwar Hasmy. To commemorate the mournful anniversary of the author of 2666, Cobos now offers this corrected version for the enjoyment of readers of Letralia.

Roberto Bolaño surprises us with his good mood and the unexpected turns his assertions take. In any case, his conversation isn’t the least bit intellectual, instead he likes to explain or provide examples with what he knows how to do: telling stories, one after another, and confirming what one suspected, that many of his characters, as incredible as they might seem, have existed in the flesh, beyond the verisimilitude demonstrated in his writings, or they serve as the undeniable confirmation that Arturo Belano, the character in several of his books, is the alter ego of this prolific writer. For anyone who has read him, there is no doubt that with him Latin American fiction will recover the vitality from which it had seen itself excluded since the death rattles of the Boom, as the structures of his works reveal an original complexity.

During the month of August, the rain is sporadic in Caracas, but it’s always threatening to show up. This is the city that received Bolaño, of Chilean origin, who came from Blanes, a little town in Catalonia, to receive the Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize (1999) for The Savage Detectives (1998). He stayed in the Hotel Ávila, whose name is a tribute to one of the mountains that surrounds the valley, and which owes all its prestige to the Modernist architecture from the time of Isaías Medina Angarita, when the sudden economic development begins in Venezuela due to the extraction of petroleum. We spoke one afternoon, in which the constant running around at times prevented us from being more at ease during the interview.


BOOKS

You published a novel with Antoni García Porta, Advice from a Morrison Disciple to a Joyce Fanatic (1984). Can you talk about the experience of writing a novel with someone else?

Toni’s a good friend. He wrote a text and gave it to me. I took the pages of the novel and did nothing but destroy it, absolutely all of it, and then I put it back together. I played with that. By the way, the title is a nod to a poem by Mario Santiago, he’s a great Mexican poet with whom I started, in Mexico, the Infrarealist movement, which is the Visceral Realists in The Savage Detectives. In the novel, he’s the character named Ulises. Mario wrote a poem called “Advice from A Marx Disciple to A Heidegger Fanatic,” in the year seventy five, which was emblematic for a whole generation of young poets, whether they were Infrarealists or not. It’s a marvelous poem, quite long, with about twenty sections.

I saw Mario read that poem aloud, it had a supernatural force. He died a few days after I finished correcting The Savage Detectives, in early ninety eight. And it was a violent death; since he was run over by a car on the street. He existed on the complete edge, he was passing through a very bad time and each day he was acting more and more violently, in an intransigent manner. Mario is a great poet, for me he’s the best poet of the last twenty years in Mexico. He was really impressive, the closest thing I’ve seen to Rimbaud’s proposals: the radicalness and the absolutely biased glow. He was one of those people that frightened whoever he was near.

One can observe two types of narrative voices that speak to others in your books. On the one hand voices that, in fragments, put together stories and on the other, the ones telling the narrator an anecdote that will be developed further. In this perspective, what’s the structural necessity of the story that makes you set up those narrative voices?

I believe, I presume, I’m not telling you this as something that’s set, it just occurred to me, that the intention is to maintain fiction in favor of conjecture, which means: this guy told me that someone else said to him and also, stories that arrive in some type of an oral manner. This attenuates the work of the structure. If I put it in there as is, if I didn’t give it the lightness of orality, the narrative structure might become too arduous for the reader and especially for the writer.

Does that, perhaps, makes sense if one thinks for example of One Thousand and One Nights?

From that point onwards everything is said. In One Thousand and One Nights, or in medieval European texts, the orality that advances is key within the interior of the tale that’s being narrated, that moves the different perspectives. This makes the work’s shell, which sometimes can’t help being heavy, become lighter, softer and it allows us, in this manner, to enter into its core.

This last point might relate to something very alluring in your work, which is the repetition of characters, who each time gain new dimensions. What relationship exists between voices and stories?

They're voices that come and go, they’re faces that come and go, stories like Stendhal wanted: any story that goes, at some point returns, but it comes back transformed and in the process of returning it has become another story, it’s like the passing of time. Besides, I’m insatiable when something comes out right for me, I squeeze it until I get the very last drop.

In my work’s project —I say work with the understanding that it’s still in process— the initial plans encompass that: stories that bifurcate, that get lost but return. That’s how characters like Abel Romero, the researcher that appears in The Savage Detectives, although that’s not the case with Amulet (1999), is included in my most recent work. Belano runs into Romero at a Chilean party in Paris, they talk about causality and chance. And Romero returns in another novel I’m writing, which is called Woes of the True Policeman, settled in Chile with his funeral parlor, he has carried out the promise he made to Belano in Distant Star (1996), which was to set up that strange business. In the same way, he has invested the money they paid him to eliminate Carlos Wieder. In any case, Romero has an ethics, which he sometimes overlooks, but he has one.

Like the detectives in Raymond Chandler?

Abel Romero is what in Chile is called a tira, and moreover a leftist tira, with class consciousness. But it’s best not to put both one’s hands in the fire for a tira, it’s best to just put one in. In the novel I mentioned, Romero is in Chile and he’s given a case, which will be his last, because from that point on this character is finished. The truth is I actually don’t know what happens with him, since I haven’t finished writing the novel yet. This is how other characters and places keep appearing: Villaviciosa, the town in The Savage Detectives, is really a city that appears in a very old poem of mine, from ninety or ninety two.

How did you elaborate the structure, for example, in The Savage Detectives?

It’s the only one it could have. It was an enormous task. It doesn’t seem like it, but the work I put into it was enormous. On the other hand, Distant Star was written in a state of grace, it took a month and a half. That one has changes regarding “Ramírez Hoffman, the infamous one,” the character from Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), which is where I got him from. There was a moment when I was taken by the desire for the well-made work, the game or experiment, and there are moments when emotiveness is more present, when it imposes itself above luxury, above the text’s sumptuous aspect.

On the other hand, in Amulet, where a story that was profiled in The Savage Detectives is recovered, the writing maintains the project with a complete coldness, even the original commas are respected. That is, the pages that provided its origin are the same as the hundred and fifty definitive ones; the incisions are surgical. That’s the relationship I’ve had with certain types of painting, I love variations in painting, serialization, despite the fact that in literature this can only be done with short texts. In that sense, Raymond Queneau has a book that clearly illustrates what I’m saying, it’s called Exercises in Style, where he repeats an anecdote a hundred times, with dissimilar techniques.

The most surprising of your books, because of the imagination you handle, is Nazi Literature in the Americas. There we see the presence of literature in many dimensions. How did those fictions originate?

Without a doubt, that’s a novel where literature is the character. And yet, it’s the latest fruit from a great branch that goes from Rodolfo Wilckoc’s The Temple of Iconoclasts, passing through Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy, and also includes Alfonso Reyes’s Real and Imagined Portraits. Of course, the itinerary falls back on Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, stopping in the prose in capsules of the French encyclopedists.

In Nazi Literature... there’s nothing beyond an exercise that turns to that tradition and in that sense it’s the most literary, where literature is the protagonist, because even though it seems to be a book of short stories it’s a novel in chapters. Besides, it’s a satyrical novel about the misery of writing, the misery of writers, the picaresque rabble of a world so apparently distant as literature apparently is and where Nazis are merely the mask to make a caricature of the modus vivendi, any writer’s existence within literature.


ARS NARRATIVA

Regarding your ars narrativa, how do you resolve writing’s day to day difficulties in a practical manner?

By waking up early, sitting in front of the computer and working. Writing lots of junk that will eventually be eliminated. I have a pretty rigorous method, I work on the structures and infrastructures of the novel; I elaborate the argument quite a bit, which is dragged along for a long time until it’s completely clear. Without a doubt, the structure gives you the material’s order ahead of time, the structure is the material, the plot enters within the structure, it’s all prepared from that point onwards.

And what about the correction of the text?

Polishing the text is like molding in sculpture: correcting, reading, rereading. Each time I correct less, I think I have more of a trade. However, in terms of a text’s correction I think Flaubert’s is the most radical project. I’m incapable of spending five or eight years writing a novel. But in relation to the text’s sedimentation time, I’m closer to Stendhal than Flaubert. The former took fifty three days to write The Charterhouse of Parma. That’s a writer. He’s the novelist in all his aspects, I feel closer to him even in terms of sexuality.

Could you give us a type of short story writer’s Decalogue?

I was once asked to write a Decalogue about how a short story should be written, and I did it as a joke, but the last point was quite serious, I said the two greatest short story writers were Anton Chekov and Raymond Carver. For me Carver is a giant among short story writers, better even that Hemingway, his capacity to create an atmosphere that has weight in any situation, he’s unrivaled. We’ve all learned from what they call the atmospheric short story, which weighs on you as a reader, where the characters move by pushing things aside, you feel the physical pressure, as though you were on another planet, in another gravity.


THE NOVEL IN CHILE TODAY, JOSÉ DONOSO AND THE TOTAL NOVEL

As for the authors who stayed in Chile, those who were formed under the dictatorship, the ones that began to publish in the nineties, people who today are between thirty and forty years old, what’s your opinion of them?

The truth is I don’t know them very well. Personally, I met Carlos Franz during a recent visit to Chile. He was one of the presenters for the new edition of The Skating Rink (1993, 1998). I also met Gonzalo Contreras, Arturo Fontaine Talavera and Diamela Eltit.

Honestly, Eltit bores me. Now, this doesn’t mean I like Luis Sepúlveda; between Spúlveda and Contreras I’m not sure which one I’d choose. I think neither of them. Although, without a doubt, there’s more inquiry in Contreras than in Sepúlveda. However, when I want to read Henry James I read him directly and the last thing that would occur to me is to read a Jamesean from Santiago de Chile.

Does it seem to you that Chilean fiction today has no weight?

A Spanish poet pointed out that poetry is a danger zone. Or it isn’t. This applies to all literature. The novel isn’t, as they think in Chile, a social island or a social display window, it’s not about marrying ministers or about being discotheque stars.

Literature is a lot like a samurai fight, but the samurai doesn’t fight against another samurai, he fights a monster, and he generally knows he’ll be defeated. To be brave, knowing ahead of time you’ll be defeated, and going out to fight, that’s literature.

Could José Donoso be a Jamesean?

It’s different, Donoso has a certain disproportion. And additionally, he wanted to be a disciple of James, but he was really a writer who didn’t owe much to the North American, with the exception, of course, of Three Bourgeois Novelettes. In certain texts, the influence of Virginia Woolf is notable, for example, in parts of The Obscene Bird of Night, or the closeness to Ford Madox Ford.

It seems Donoso was a fan of the English language, he grew up reading the classics in that language.

That’s right. But there’s even shameful things in him, that actually come from French literature. The influence of André Gide on him, the prose of The Catacombs of the Vatican could be decisive, that can be detected. Although Donoso was a very complex author and with very pendular tastes, which is something I don’t see in more recent Chilean authors.

In that sense, Donoso’s ambition corresponds with the Boom, where the search for the total novel stigmatized that generation. Does the ambition for the total novel seem valid to you?

I don’t think the total novel exists. But it seems magnificent to me when the writer says: I’m going to achieve the total novel. That seems admirable to me. The work of a Lezama Lima, of Cortázar, of Vargas Llosa, got very close; the work of Fernando del Paso or Donoso himself in The Obscene Bird... and later on with A House in the Country. With the latter he tries to cover the entire tragic destiny of Latin America. In him, that experience is crucial.

The way you say it, it seems to be an act of great heroism...

All those protean writers that confront the impossible novel, they seem to me like the advanced Spaniards who came almost adrift on the ships. The attempts to seek the total novel seem magnificent to me, no one will achieve it, because the very nature of the novel escapes totality, there is no total novel; if it ever existed, it was made by Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky or Flaubert. The latter, in that respect, had an extreme lucidity, superior to all of us. Bouvard et Pécuchet is a laboratory where, among many things, the impossibility, not only of the total novel but of the novel itself, is demonstrated time and time again.

Besides, that appearance and disappearance of characters in different books of mine, I can see it as proof of my impossibility of arriving at the total novel, as a symptom and as a demonstration, both things at once. I love unattainable challenges.

On the other hand, we have the writers of “minor” works.

Indeed. Magnificent writers who opted for the minor work, for the miniature. In that regard, I refer myself to perfectionists of minimal prose, such as, for example, Julio Torri, Augusto Monterroso or even Juan José Arreola, all of them Latin American authors who are opposed to the conception of the novel that we’re talking about. Well, there’s also Rodrigo Rey Rosa, among the more recent ones, who opts for the apparently minor text, not even the perfect text, if one compares him to Donoso. There are short stories by Rey Rosa where you check a phrase and it makes you think that phrase could have been written in a better and more effective manner, and yet, he has constructed it in that way while being fully aware of what he was doing.

You met Donoso, you even refer to your encounter with him, in a cyphered manner, in The Savage Detectives. What impression did he make on you?

Yes. The encounter is described in the novel. I spent a whole afternoon with him, he seemed like a good person, very simple, from all points of view. On the other hand, he had the sincerity to portray himself in a ruthless manner. That’s how I see him in The Garden Next Door, his last great book, besides the lucidity with which it’s written, he describes himself with an astonishing cruelty. This is a characteristic of worthy novelists.

Donoso’s fate is quite a paradox. It’s sad. He returned to Chile to take up the position of rector in literature. That is, the place of the rooster in the chicken coop. But you can’t be a rooster without critical thought, and he was a born fiction writer, who barely had any other aptitudes. His nature didn’t allow for the leader’s rude temper, he didn’t have the Nerudian or Huidobrian boldness to be a rooster and he was basically a good person, because in order to be the rooster in the hen house you have to be a bad person. The figure of Donoso is respected in Chile, but not very much and his fate seems to me that of the typical Latin American writer, a very sad fate.

Roberto Bolaño at the Hotel Ávila, in Caracas. Photograph: Eduardo Cobos.

{ Eduardo Cobos, Letralia, 5 August 2013 }

Bolaño, ¿cuero rock o foto pop? / Heriberto Yépez

Bolaño, Leather Rock or Photo Pop?

Because it is a capitalist career and the inertia of the avant-garde, the academy seeks the “new.”

Ten years after his physical disappearance and fifteen since his hit, Roberto Bolaño is a Latin American writer for readers with literary aspirations.

Literature was a midwife and progenitor for Borges, Rulfo, the Neo-Baroques and the Boom, for which the academy only managed to be ambassador and refrigerator. But Bolaño was already given birth to by the true savage detectives: capitalist readers.

Bolaño dreamed of typing good literature on a cash register. He was planning cryogenics: cool Latin American literature in times of agony. The novel as nostalgia for the novel.

Personal comparative literature. Having that language is gold: the Bolaño oeuvre consists of characters or worlds that are episodes of national literatures and a Calvary for writers. It seems like a “reflection” but it’s retro.

Bolaño’s prose isn’t out of this world. Nor are his structures or beings. His success was transforming the essays of Carlos Fuentes (the sexiest essayist from the Boom) into novels and publishable drafts. He was a designer.

By speaking Hopscotch (colloquially), Bolaño is a Chilean-Mexican-Spanish (atrocious ménage) adaptation of intellectual table talk and paper arrogance. Bolaño wears a rocker’s leather vest but he’s pop.

We liked Bolaño because he marked a moment when readers, journalists, critics, students, writers and academics all read the same book at the same time.

Latin American literature in real time and overtime. All his books are memories of other fashions and resistances.

Sufficiently exiled to be Latino literary coffee, Bolaño tastes like a “savage.” But a savage wearing jeans, an exotic with a brand.

He’s a marginal writer from the 1970s who knew how to become a 1998 Canon camera.

He knew that in order to “save himself” all he needed was a novelistic contest, the possible market. He made a novel about a Hispanic dandy who pretends to be a leader of poets, and who doesn’t actually write a total novel (but creates the illusion that he could).

Bolaño, as an “important” writer, is a product for export.

When others were preaching the death of the Latin American novel, Bolaño raised the flag anew, and the best part is that he didn’t have a clear nationality. Almost a white flag, asking postmodernism for Paz.

Bolaño’s pages appeal to the complete gamut of cultural agents.

And because the figure of the actor, the writer and the singer are blended into one with him, his literature is read like photography.

Bolaño didn’t write a single genre with excellence, but he remembers them all and this age likes that.

We, the savage detectives, that is, desperate collectors and romantic readers.

Bolaño consisted of being ultra-literary in a very unliterary age, artificial respiration for several literatures —Mexico, Chile, Spain, the United States— in a minor era.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Archivo Hache, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 19 July 2013 }

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 }

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 }

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 }

La gira / Roberto Bolaño

The Tour

My idea was to interview John Malone, the vanished musician. Five years ago, Malone had abandoned that dark region where legends live and now, in actuality, he was no longer newsworthy, though fans didn’t forget his name. In the sixties of the 20th century Malone, along with Jacob Morley and Dan Endycott, was one of the founders of Broken Zoo, one of the era’s most successful rock groups. In 1966 Broken Zoo recorded their first LP. It was a magnificent record, representing the height of what was being done in England at the time, and I’m talking about years when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were active. Soon the second LP appeared and to the surprise of everyone it was better than the first. Broken Zoo did a European tour and then one of the United States. The North American tour went on for several months. While they traveled from city to city the album rose in the charts until it eventually reached number one. When they returned to London they took a few days off. Morley locked himself in a mansion he had just bought in the outskirts of London where he had a private recording studio. Endycott devoted himself to hooking up with all the beautiful girls who swarmed around the band, until one of these beauties bound herself to him, they bought a house in Belgrade and got married. Malone, on the other hand, seemed more subdued. According to some biographers of Broken Zoo, he attended strange parties, although they never specified what they, the biographers, meant by strange parties. I suppose that in the slang of the era this meant a mixture of sex and drugs. Soon afterward Malone disappeared and following a prudent amount of time, a month?, two months?, the band’s manager gave a press conference where he announced what was already common knowledge: John Malone had left the group without any explanation. Soon afterward Morley and Endycott appeared, along with the drummer, Ronnie Palmer, and another one of the musicians, Corrigan, and gave their version of what happened. Save for Ronnie Palmer, Malone didn’t contact anyone. He called Palmer a few weeks after his disappearance just to tell him he was alright, that they shouldn’t look for him and shouldn’t wait for him because he wasn’t planning on coming back. Many people assumed the band was over. Malone was the best and without him it was hard to imagine the survival of Broken Zoo. But then Morley locked himself for a month or so in his mansion in the outskirts and Endycott spent ten hours a day working at Morley’s house, until they put together the band’s third LP. Against the expectations of critics Broken Zoo’s third album was better than the previous ones. In the first one, seventy percent of the songs were written by Malone. Both the lyrics and the music. In the second one, seventy percent of the songs belong to Malone. The remaining thirty and twenty-five percent, respectively, belong to Morley and Endycott, save for a song on the second LP whose lyrics are co-written by Morley and Palmer and which undoubtedly constitutes an exception. On the third album, on the other hand, ninety percent of the songs belong to Morley and Endycott, and the remaining ten percent are split between Palmer, Morley and Endycott and a new musician, Venable, who joined the band when it became clear that Malone wouldn’t be back. There’s a song dedicated to Malone on the album. There are no recriminations. Only friendship and admiration. It’s titled “When Will You Be Back?” and was released as a single and in less than two weeks it reached first place on the London top ten. Malone, of course, didn’t come back, and although several journalists at the time set out to find him, all attempts were in vain. It was even said that he died in a French city and that his remains were buried in a common grave. As for Broken Zoo, the third album was followed by a fourth one, which was unanimously applauded, and after the fourth came a fifth album and then a sixth, a double, which was the apotheosis, the unsurpassable LP, and then they spent some time without playing, but then they released a seventh LP, quite good, then an eighth one and in the mid-eighties they released their ninth album, once again a double, and it seemed as though Morley and Endycott had made a pact with the devil, because the ninth swept the world, from Japan to Holland, from New Zealand to Canada, storming through Thailand like a tornado, which is already quite a feat. Then the band split up, though from time to time they reunited to play their songs for very special occasions, on specific days. In 1995 a journalist from Rolling Stone discovered where Malone was. The article only caused stupor among die hard fans of Broken Zoo, those who still had copies of the first record on vinyl. Most readers could have cared less about what had happened to a guy most people had written off as dead. Malone’s life, during that time, to a certain degree, seemed like a living death. When he left London what he did was simply go back to his parents’ house. That was it. He stayed there for two years, without doing anything, while his colleagues were launching their conquest of the universe.




{ Roberto Bolaño, El secreto del mal, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2007 }

Bolañismo

Two years ago I wrote an essay about correspondences between Roberto Bolaño’s two masterpieces, The Savage Detectives and 2666 and Roque Dalton’s only novel, the posthumous (and still untranslated) Pobrecito poeta que era yo... (1976). Since then, my essay (“Poor Poets: Roque Dalton and Roberto Bolaño”) continues to be the single most read post at Venepoetics, and I recently noticed someone cites it at Bolaño’s Wikipedia page. I not only compared their novels, but spoke of a possible friendship between the two, when they allegedly met in San Salvador in the mid 1970s. But I might have been mistaken about this encounter between Dalton and Bolaño.

As with much of my work, I now find my essay to be clumsy and repetitive, clouded by poor prose and vague arguments. I wrote the text after noticing a brief fragment in a 2005 feature about Bolaño in The New York Times by Larry Rohter, “A Writer Whose Posthumous Novel Crowns an Illustrious Career.” I was intrigued by Rohter’s suggestion that Bolaño had met Dalton in San Salvador in late 1973 or early 1974: “After an interlude in El Salvador, spent in the company of the poet Roque Dalton and the guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, he returned to Mexico living as a bohemian poet and literary enfant terrible [...].”

I spent two years seeking evidence about this alleged meeting, but Rohter’s article was the only thing I found that directly linked the two writers. I suppose I should have simply written him to ask where he’d gotten this piece of information. Bolaño himself mentioned having lived briefly in El Salvador where he befriended Dalton’s young killers (the most famous of which is the former FMLN commander Joaquín Villalobos, who is currently a scholar at Oxford). Back then, that hardcore band of Maoist guerrillas didn’t even call themselves the FMLN, they were an ultra-leftist group of kids barely out of their teens known as the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP).

Dalton eventually fell out of favor with this faction he was aligned with during his time living underground in a series of safe houses in San Salvador, from December of 1973 until his death in the spring of 1975. Because so much of his life depended on secrecy back then, it’s still not clear exactly who ordered his murder and why exactly he was killed. I’ve heard all sorts of reasons, including that they suspected him of being a CIA agent, that he had slept with one of their girlfriends, or that they mistrusted his advice about not rushing into revolutionary action before the time was right. It’s likely the truth about Dalton’s disappearance will never be known, as even his body was never recovered.

Two days ago, Rohter published another article about Bolaño, “A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past,” in which he quotes old friends in Mexico and Spain who claim he may have invented portions of his own life for public consumption. The most prominent of these possible inventions is the story that he was in Chile during the coup against Salvador Allende. I won’t go further into the article, as much of it seems like mere literary gossip. What matters about Bolaño is his magnificent work, not how he chose to portray his life or the stories he may have invented in order to become the writer he was destined to be. If anything, Bolaño’s possible distortions of his own life seem like a marvelous extension of his visionary work, further blurring the line between art and lived experience.

But reading the article has confirmed certain doubts I began to have soon after writing my essay on a possible friendship between Dalton and Bolaño. I have to admit that after four years of research and detective work, in El Salvador, the U.S. and Venezuela, I still have no idea if the two writers ever did meet. I’m pretty sure Bolaño could have befriended members of the ERP, but I have yet to find convincing evidence or testimony that he was in direct contact with Dalton. I don’t know what this means for my essay. However, I stand by the parallels I point out between their novels.

By the way, when will somebody finally translate Dalton’s Pobrecito poeta que era yo..., probably the only Latin American Boom masterpiece that hasn’t been published in English yet? I’d love to try it, but someone would have to provide the money I’d need to take on such a gargantuan task. Then again, Dalton’s book remains unread even in Latin America. It seems to have disappeared into a stack of the infinite library, a fact Bolaño & Borges would appreciate. When Pobrecito poeta que era yo... is finally read throughout Latin America, and once American readers finally get to know the novel, the one-sided perception of Dalton as being merely a “revolutionary” or “political” poet will seem like an antiquated misreading. I still have no doubt that Roberto Bolaño read Roque Dalton’s novel and was deeply influenced by its bohemian, revolutionary and psychedelic meanderings. Plus, the account of their friendship in San Salvador would make a great Bolaño story. Here’s to the secret books.

Todo sobre tu bolañomanía (Oprah incluida) / Heriberto Yépez

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bolañomania (Including Oprah)

Bolañomania continues. 2666 – his mammoth posthumous tome – keeps appearing on all the lists of the best books of 2008 in the U.S.A., where madness reaches the lowest depths.

Recently, O, The Oprah Magazine – the pre-Obama of the self-help talk shows – indirectly explained the inexplicable boom to us. I say it’s inexplicable because if Oprah is feminism transformed into a yo-yo diet, Bolaño was Mr. Misogyny 1975. It seems her Book Club hasn’t found out yet. Much less that the dead girls from Juárez came from the book Huesos en el desierto by Sergio González Rodríguez.

If I were Sergio I’d sue Bolaño’s editors for plagiarism just to get some of the royalties. Bob Bolaño would also suggest he do that.

The review from Oprah says: “Holding a reviewer's copy of 2666 in public was like brandishing the newest Harry Potter at the playground three months before the on-sale date.” It’s so cool to be seen reading Bolaño! Who would have guessed it? The dead women of Juárez (refried) are perfect for making friends in the park!

“Bolaño has particularly captured the imaginations of younger readers because his work is rather like a video game or a set of nested webpages…” WHAT? Some reviews smell like weed. That explains the allusion to Harry Potter.

“Stories within stories with many apparent authors, and little sense of predetermined purpose.” Translation: 2666 isn’t as good as The Savage Detectives, but it is more impressive; Bolaño died before he was able to revise it and it’s a brick you have to praise so as to not seem like a beast. Though you won’t stop being a kiss ass because 2666 isn’t fleshed out, even though The New York Times, Publishers Weekly and Time all say it is.

But the best part comes next, what finished knocking down the fence: “His work evokes American pulp…” Ha! I don’t think so, but OK, go on, “…Gabriel García Márquez…” It’s so obvious that One Hundred Years is the only Latin American book they’ve read! Bolaño would have shit his pants if he found out he’d been declared as Gabolaño of the Year, “… and Mexican surrealist…” – Mexican surrealism? Oh boy, I didn’t even realize it existed – “…and Mexican surrealist Juan Rulfo.” No fucking way! Rulfo a surrealist? In his realism, but not in mine, baby. Oprah is so ludicrous.

“The book is long and intense… and so will repay every moment of attention you can give it.” In other words, we know that no one will read even 25% of it but what a perfect book to give as a gift or for lifting weights with your eyelids.

Bolaño’s success in the United States illustrates the misunderstandings of transnational techno-marketing wherein a work becomes merchandise and in order to recommend it one has to list it alongside previous sales or suggestions that the hybrid is hypnotic, now that the remix is the New Neutral, the New Black (AKA, the New White!).

Bolaño couldn’t have imagined it. But Bolañomania was inevitable.

In the 70s, Bolaño thought he was untamable; today, Herralde exports him, Obama loves him and, best of all, Oprah is an Infrarrealist.




{ Heriberto Yépez, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 10 January 2009 }

Bolaño Salvaje

There’s a democratic quality to much of Bolaño’s writing that might explain the best-seller craze surrounding his work right now in the U.S. The Savage Detectives projects a multitude of voices, from pimps and drug dealers to sensitive poets, housewives, drunk old men, even Octavio Paz’s clueless secretary gets several pages. More importantly, this multiplicity is sustained by the impeccable structure Bolaño provides his readers, beginning with a youthful, self-absorbed personal diary and moving into the staccato counterpoints of the hundreds of testimonials narrating the disintegration of a group of radical poets across the globe.

From the moment I began reading his first masterpiece (how many writers come up with two masterpieces within five years of each other?), I knew The Savage Detectives was a text that included actual parts of my childhood, adolescence and early twenties. So it doesn’t surprise me that this novel continues to hold a particular allure for me. I haven’t read it a second time yet, as I’m waiting for the right moment to do so, already anticipating the new vistas it will provide. Maybe part of what gives the book its distinctive quality is the aesthetic stance (actually, a credo) Bolaño reveals in an interview Rodrigo Fresán quoted from last year in his Letras Libres review of El secreto del mal (Anagrama, 2007) and La Universidad Desconocida (Anagrama, 2007), “El samurái romántico”:


“Literature looks a lot like a fight between samurais, but a samurai doesn’t fight against another samurai: he fights with a monster. He generally knows, moreover, that he will be defeated. Having the courage, knowing ahead of time that you’ll be defeated, and going out to fight: that’s literature.”


Fresán’s review is reprinted in the excellent volume of essays on Bolaño’s work edited in Barcelona, Spain by Edmundo Paz Soldán and Gustavo Faverón Patriau, Bolaño Salvaje (Editorial Candaya, 2008). Fresán compares Bolaño’s posthumous collection of prose texts, El secreto del mal, gathered from fragments in the author’s computer, to “a collection not of greatest hits but rather of essential B-sides, demos and rarities, those kinds that help you listen to the greatest hits yet again and even more closely.”

The essays in this book range from personal reminiscences by friends, to more theoretical explorations of specific themes in Bolaño’s work. Bolaño’s literary executor, Ignacio Echevarría writes (in a 2002 essay entitled “Bolaño extraterritorial”) about his work within the frame of two concepts: mathematical fractals, as invented by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975, and George Steiner’s notion of extraterritoriality. Echevarría reminds us that all of Bolaño’s books, whether poems, short stories or novels, remain open-ended, unfinished, and thus provide the reader a chance to contribute to their process:


“This principal of fractalism operates in all of Bolaño’s work in a more or less diffuse manner. As with so many writers who are masters of a singular world and style, even if in his case it occurs in a particularly acute fashion, whatever book of Bolaño’s one might begin with inducts the reader into a common space where all the remaining books coincide.”


It is the notion of extraterritoriality that probably speaks most directly to me in Bolaño’s writing, a sense of permanent displacement, of perpetual travel and alienation from any notion of belonging to a single nation or cultural identity. The multiplicity of forms and voices in Bolaño’s work often reflects his own personal concerns, as someone who early on lost any hope of belonging to a specific place, group or identity. Echevarría discusses Steiner’s 1971 essay as a signpost towards work that writers like Bolaño would soon be creating in response to the late 20th century, particularly in Latin America:


“Steiner attributes the condition of exile that so many contemporary writers share as “the central impulse of literature today.” And it is important to note how this condition of exile doesn’t necessarily have political motivations. It has to do with something broader: “It has to do with the more general problem of the loss of the center.” ”


Many of the essays in this book come from Latin American writers who belong to generations emerging under Bolaño’s generous influence, writers in whom Bolaño expressed an interest, reading their work and befriending many of them. Jorge Volpi’s essay “Bolaño, epidemia,” addresses how he serves as a rare moment of agreement for younger generations of writers, whose projects and goals are too varied to really fit into any simple maps or categories. Bolaño exists as a vortex of sorts, even if it’s in the inevitable reaction against his ubiquity that’s already emerging among some writers and readers. Volpi recounts Bolaño’s last public appearance, at a conference in Sevilla shortly before he died, when his particular brand of humor and irreverence charmed the audience of young Latin American writers. As with so much in Bolaño’s writing, Volpi identifies the democratic and demotic nature of Bolaño’s voice. As well as the romantic, at times mystical, impulse one occasionally feels in his writing:


“In Sevilla, where he was supposed to read “Sevilla me mata,” but where he wasn’t able to read “Sevilla me mata,” in front of a dozen young writers – young by decree, I repeat – who admired and envied him and listened to him like a wizard or an oracle, one night Bolaño repeated, over and over, the same joke. A bad joke. A terrible joke. One of those jokes that make no one laugh. A guy goes up to a girl in a bar. “Hi, what’s your name?” he asks her. “ My name’s Nuria.” “Nuria, do you wanna fuck?” Nuria responds: “I thought you’d never ask.” Five, ten, twenty variations on the same topic. On that futile, banal, insignificant topic. That bad joke. That terrible joke. That joke that makes no one laugh. But the young writers gathered in Sevilla listened to it out of their minds, positive that somewhere within it the secret of the world was to be found.”

2666

I’m astonished by the amount of attention Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 has been getting recently, including Time naming it the Best Book of 2008. I agree, of course, with all the praise and intend to reread the book soon in English, slowing down this time to pick up whatever stray weirdness and glimmers I may have missed. When I read it in 2004 I had the sensation of what readers of Cortázar’s Rayuela must have felt in the mid-sixties, the realization that you’re in the presence of a book that changes the landscape around itself. Certain books take on a talismanic quality as your read them, and Bolaño’s two major novels had that effect on me. It just feels odd to see a personal reading landscape being proclaimed in newspaper and magazine headlines. I usually think of my tastes as being relatively marginal. Bolaño’s choice of Baudelaire as a starting point for this book seems completely appropriate as a hinge into whatever arcades we’re now proceeding through at the turn of the century. The Savage Detectives and 2666 serve as platforms from which Bolaño’s ghost accompanies us without pretense, ideology, prophecy or resolution. Earnest ambition reiterating the book as a practical talisman, portable in the convenient 3-tome paperback edition FSG has just published.


“In 1935, Ivanov’s novels were withdrawn from bookstores. A few days later, an official notice informed him of his expulsion from the party. According to Ansky, Ivanov spent three days unable to get out of bed. On the bed were his three novels and he reread them constantly, searching for something that might justify his expulsion. He moaned and whimpered and tried unsuccessfully to take refuge in his earliest childhood memories. He stroked the spines of his books with heartbreaking melancholy. Sometimes he got up and went over to the window and spent hours looking into the street.” (724)

La victoria / Roberto Bolaño

Victory

You can’t be safe anywhere
You’ve examined your possibilities and now
You’re in the abyss waiting for a stroke of luck

Dolce stil nuovo of coldness, doing this
Your actual body won’t go anywhere
But your armored shadow might flee

Now your possibilities are called none
Since you no longer brag about having met danger
Nor will a stroke of luck turn on this lamp

You exist within poetry’s secret
And now you can’t be safe anywhere
Neither in words nor adventure

Behind your promise hides Promise
A child will travel through wars again
In the reflection of your imaginary coldness

Beloved even by danger, your instant
Of absolute abyss arrived look over there
Amidst the trees your shadow lifts a corpse




{ Roberto Bolaño, La Universidad Desconocida, Editorial Anagrama, 2007 }

“Ahora tu cuerpo es sacudido por...” / Roberto Bolaño

“Now your body is shaken by...”

Now your body is shaken by
nightmares. You are no longer
the same person: who loved,
who took risks.
You are no longer the same person, even if
tomorrow everything might vanish
like a bad dream and you begin
again. Tomorrow
you might begin again.
And the sweat, the cold,
the erratic detectives,
will be like a dream.
Don’t give up.
Now you’re shaking, but tomorrow
everything might begin again.




{ Roberto Bolaño, La Universidad Desconocida, Editorial Anagrama, 2007 }

Gitanos / Roberto Bolaño

Gypsies

Unbearably free, says the voice.
Behind the fenced in landscape, at the curve,
Beside the thicket, precisely in that hole
I had the dream of corpses. Something
Very simple. A pile of cadavers
At dusk. But then one of them
Said: Don’t be scared, I am the book of
The gypsies, I will show you two things
Before going down the line.
Let me summarize it: freedom and poverty
Were a flag. The flag of those who
Fell at the curve.




{ Roberto Bolaño, La Universidad Desconocida, Editiorial Anagrama, 2007 }

La Universidad Desconocida

According to the introductory note for this posthumous collection of poems by Roberto Bolaño, La Universidad Desconocida (Anagrama, 2007) spans the late 70s and early 90s. The manuscript sat in Bolaño’s files for over a decade and now appears as this 500-page volume. These poems are evidence of a chaotic transition from the lyric (no matter how ironic or punk Bolaño might be) to the multitude of voices and narratives that would emerge in his fiction, particularly the late novels Los detectives salvajes and 2666, with their interpretation of poetry as an encyclopedic art.

La Universidad Desconocida tries to be an encyclopedia, too, a personal cartography borne on currents running between a disparate procession of spots on the Atlantic map, Mexico City and Barcelona anchoring the poet from past and present faults. Reading this book, I think of the two masterpieces by The Clash, London Calling and Sandinista! Bolaño’s poems inhabit the same irreverent, eclectic, desperate universe as those two albums. The unhinged elegy of a song like “Spanish Bombs” is echoed in Bolaño’s post-revolutionary poetry.

He argues against Paz as much as he does against Cardenal, though his affection for both is evident. Perhaps the central figure in Bolaño’s poems is Nicanor Parra, whose ingenuity and sarcasm inform the struggle to write about an exponential sequence of generational and personal failures. Mid-way through La Universidad Desconocida, a visionary faith is abandoned and its loss lamented matter-of-factly, hard humor:


Post Scriptum
Of what is lost, inevitably lost, I only hope to recover my writing’s daily disposition, lines capable of grabbing me by the hair and pulling me up when my body might not want to hold on any more. (Significant, said the stranger.) Both human and divine. Like those verses by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to arm himself with courage, my writing should be like that. (242)

“Te regalaré un abismo, dijo ella...” / Roberto Bolaño

“I’ll give you an abyss, she said...”

I’ll give you an abyss, she said,
but so subtly you will only notice it
after many years have passed
and you’re far from Mexico and from me.
You will discover it when you need it most,
and that won’t be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you’ll remember me,
though not much.




{ Roberto Bolaño, La Universidad Desconocida, Editorial Anagrama, 2007 }

Un soneto / Roberto Bolaño

A Sonnet

It was 16 years ago Ted Berrigan published
his Sonnets. Mario carried the book around
the leper colonies of Paris. Now Mario’s
in Mexico and The Sonnets are on
a bookshelf I built with my own
hands. I think I found the wood
near the retirement home in Montealegre
and made the bookshelf with Lola. In
the winter of 78, in Barcelona, when
I still lived with Lola! And it’s already been
16 years since Ted Berrigan published his book
and maybe 17 or 18 since he wrote it
and on certain mornings, certain afternoons,
lost in a neighborhood cinema I try to read it,
when the movie ends and the lights come on.




{ Roberto Bolaño, La Universidad Desconocida, Editorial Anagrama, 2007 }