"Ernesto Cardenal and I" (Roberto Bolaño)

I've added the link to the poem "Ernesto Cardenal and I" to "A guide to online writings of Roberto Bolaño." I somehow missed including this poem whose translation first appeared in Poetry magazine in 2008. The translator is Laura Healy, though she wasn't credited in the Poetry Foundation site. It's also in the collection The Romantic Dogs.

Ernesto Cardenal (b. 1925) was a Catholic priest and poet from Nicaragua. Bolaño also wrote about Cardenal in a flash essay in Between Parentheses (forthcoming in translation from New Directions). He considered him "one of Latin America's greatest poets."

Second epilogue for variations: “The Lost Detectives” (Roberto Bolaño)

As with "Godzilla in Mexico," wording and phrase substitutions ("Teen Theater" vs. "Theater of Youth") and punctuation in a poem can hint at a subtle change of meaning, a subtle creation of feeling ...

The Lost Detectives -Translation by Laura Healy Detectives lost in the dark city. I heard their moans. I heard their footsteps in the Teen Theater. A voice coming on like an arrow. Shadows of cafes and parks, Adolescent hangouts. Detectives who stare at Their open palms, Destiny stained by their own blood. And you can’t even recall Where the wound was, The faces you once loved, The woman who saved your life.

The Lost Detectives  -Translation by Guillermo Parra The lost detectives in the dark city I heard their moans I heard their steps in the Theater of Youth A voice advancing like an arrow Shadow of cafés and parks Frequented during adolescence The detectives who observe Their open hands Destiny stained with its own blood And you can’t even remember Where you were injured The faces you once loved The woman who saved your life

Epilogue for variations: “Godzilla in Mexico” (Roberto Bolaño)

Here are two versions of  Roberto Bolaño’s “Godzilla in Mexico,” an apocalyptic conversation between a parent and child. Essentially the same, but the subtle differences in word choices and line breaks provide two distinct readings.


Godzilla in Mexico
Roberto Bolaño
-Translation by Laura Healy


Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn't tell you we were on death's program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn't be afraid.
When it left, death didn't even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
Ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We're human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.



Godzilla in Mexico
Roberto Bolaño
-A version by B. H. Boston


Hear me, my son: bombs were dropping

all over Mexico City,

but no one realized.

The air spread poison through

the streets and open windows.

You’d just eaten breakfast and were

watching the detectives on TV.

I was reading in the next room

when I knew we were going to die.

Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself

to the dining room and found you on the floor.

I held you close. You asked me what was happening.

I didn’t tell you we were on death’s telethon

but I whispered, We are going on a journey,

you and I, together, don’t be afraid.

When leaving, death didn’t even close our eyes.

What are we? you asked a week a year later,

ants, bees, wrong numbers

in the great spoiled soup of chance?

We are human beings, my son, nearly birds,

public heroes and secrets.

"Los Neochilenos" (Roberto Bolaño)

“Los Neochilenos” (“The Neochileans”) is the second of three poems in Tres. Tres is Roberto Bolaño’s second collection of poetry in Spanish and what he considered to be one of his two best books, that is to say his best writing. It will be brought to English soon in a translation by Laura Healy, who also did The Romantic Dogs.


We also know that Erica Mena had completed her English version of the entire Tres sequence. (An excerpt of the first poem in Tres, “Tales of the Autumn in Gerona”, was published last month in Words Without Borders.) However, according to Erica herself, she wasn’t allowed to bring out her version in book form. This elicited strong reactions from critics.


Published in the latest issue (Issue 25 - Winter/Spring 2010) of the literary journal Washington Square was perhaps another translation of this poem. The translation was by Mariela Griffor. Maybe this is again only an excerpt as it was titled "de los Neochilenos" in the archive.


Back in 2008, the magazine n+1 also published "Los Neochilenos" (issue no. 7: Correction). The translator was not credited online and only a very short fragment of the poem was available online. I’m not sure if the magazine published the whole poem. (EDIT: They did publish it in full. But the full-text poem is one of the most highly valued pieces of the magazine. It would cost some $75,000 for it to appear online.) Here is the fragment:

Los Neochilenos [excerpt]
by Roberto Bolaño

And the only thing
Truly pleasant
That we saw in Arica
Was the sun of Arica:
A sun like a cloud of
Dust.
A sun like sand
Subtly displacing
The motionless air.
The rest: routine.
Killers and converts
Mixed in the same discussion
Of deaf-mutes,
Of idiots undone
By purgatory.
And the lawyer Vivanco
A friend of Don Luis Sanchez
Asked what kind of crap we were trying to pull
With this Neochilenos bullshit.

So there may be 3 or 4 English translations of this poem alone while there are two extant versions (by Healy and Mena) of the entire book Tres. Only one English Tres, however, was authorized to come out. Which is a pity. I think the more translations available of a single work, the more exciting the situation will be for readers who are only able to access the works of a writer in translation.


Multiple translations will sharpen our perception of how literature sounded in the original. I find it exciting to compare several versions of a single work. Right now I’m reading side by side two translations of Norwegian Wood by Murakami Haruki – Jay Rubin’s authorized version (2000) and Alfred Birnbaum’s earlier translation (1989) for Kodansha – and enjoying both versions so far. A few months ago, I’ve finished Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal, in a supple translation by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin. I first encountered it in the spare version of Leon Ma. Guerrero. I wouldn’t mind rereading it again in the first translation (in a supposedly baroque style) done at the turn of 20th century by Charles Derbyshire and in the latest rendering by Harold Augenbraum. Of course, I also won't let pass Lacson-Locsin's rendition of El Filibusterismo, the sequel to Rizal’s book (my favorite of the two based on my readings of Ma. Guerrero). Reading multiple translations is a great way to increase understanding of the work of fantastic writers one would not have any other way to read.


In an interview, translator par excellence Edith Grossman was asked a hypothetical question: Assuming that a reader or reviewer is trying to choose between two translations of a book, how can she judge which of the two is the better? Grossman’s reply was instructive:

In a way it’s like asking, how do you choose between two pianists who perform a Beethoven sonata? Well, maybe you listen to both. The fact that you like one doesn’t mean the other is inadequate. In the case of a book that’s been translated more than once, if you have several translations, how terrific for you. That means you have a very, very broad range of interpretation.

I find Erica’s excerpt in Words Without Borders to be a revelation. It's a side of Bolaño the poet I haven't encountered before. It is disappointing that her complete version of Tres is not to be allowed to see print. As what I’ve said before, I’d like Laura Healy and Erica Mena to bring out their separate interpretations of this trilogy of poems so that we will have a chance to experience two unique readings of it. Certainly not to decide which version is superior but to detect correspondences and deviations between the two translations which is a way for us readers to closely read a poem or, in Grossman’s terms, to listen to a performance of a great symphony. This poetry collection is what Bolaño personally considered one of his best works. Maybe we owe it to him that we must make an attempt to listen to his lines and learn his art as it was created before our very own eyes, in as many interpretations as the concert hall can produce.

The best of Bolaño is yet to come

Or at least the one-half of it. If Bolaño himself (crafty mythmaker) is to be believed. Forrest Gander mentioned in his not-fully-available-online essay, “Un Lio Bestial,” in The Nation, that ‘Bolaño considered Tres (Three), a book of poems published in 2000, to be "one of my two best books."’ The other best book being ... I don’t know.


Such straight pronouncements are characteristic of Bolaño, whose essays are often riddled by Parra-like (Parrian?) puzzles. These puzzles of Bolaño appear like Freudian slips that are both conscious and unconscious, thrown to the wind and catching them at the same time.


Bolaño has interpreted a poem by the anti-poet Nicanor Parra, a poem that plays on numbers: “The four great poets of Chile / Are three: / Alonso de Ercilla and Rubén Dario.” Bolaño’s close reading of this poem was recounted in an essay by Marcela Valdes, also in The Nation. This anti-poem inspired a joke which I’m sure Bolaño will appreciate: “So the two best works of Bolano/ Are one/ Three.”


And then there is this last advice of Bolaño to an aspiring short story writer: “Read Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver, for one of the two of them is the best writer of the twentieth century.” He does not say which one. I’m inclined to vote for the Russian but then the “seriousness” of the joke is bound to be broken once I made the wager.


Tres, by the way, is a compilation of three poems. Another collection of Bolaño poems is Los perros románticos (The Romantic Dogs) which collects the poems of Bolaño starting from 1980. Both poetry collections were published in 2000; I’m not sure which came first. But so far I loved The Romantic Dogs. Intentional or not, a sort of “Parrian subtraction” is actually embedded in the book. At the back of the book it says that it is “a bilingual collection of forty-four poems,” but strangely I (dizzy) counted only 43 in the table of contents. I'm counting again later to make sure. And also at the back page, there’s a blurb by Forrest Gander about a poem describing some "fist-fucking" and "feet-fucking" and mentioning “Pascal, Nazi generals, Shining Path bonfires, and a teenage hooker.” Well, pray tell me which poem is this in the book, because I haven’t found it. Maybe I did not read close enough. This could be the 44th poem so it has to be somewhere in there.


A few months back I came across Garabatos, a journal blog by Laura Healy, the translator of The Romantic Dogs. It was started sometime in June, I think. I cannot open it directly now; you need to subscribe. But I have my RSS feed. There were only two journal entries to date.


In the first entry, “Introduction,” we get to have a glimpse of Healy's background: “The Part About the Translator of Poetry.”

I started this blog to help me study for my general exams as I start my first year of work toward a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard. My specialty is 20th-century Latin American literature. I’ve always known I should start a reading journal, but I’ve just never had the discipline, so hopefully this blog will be a way for me to record my initial reactions to different texts, without having to adhere to any particular format. That’s the hope. We’ll see how it goes.

And then she provided her reading list in Spanish lit for the course she's taking, 154 books in all!


Poetry has always been sidetracked in favor of prose. B was aware of it and so he “shifted” to fiction to better fend for his family. The quantity of his novels far outweighs that of his poetry, but readers do not complain.


Even in translation, focus has always been given to B’s novels and stories rather than his poems. Of course, his poems are the batteries energizing the flashlights of his fiction.


Here's the beginning of the second journal entry by Healy ("A Bolaño Fanatic"):

I’m not quite sure where to start here, since Bolaño has been such an incredibly important figure for me. I first found out about him from Zach and Jonah in 2005. Jonah had heard about him from some friends in Chile and Zach had been reading Chris Andrews’ translations of Distant Star (1996) and By Night in Chile (2000), both published by New Directions. Distant Star is a beautiful, flawless little novella, though I found myself more engrossed by the voice of Father Urrutia in By Night in Chile. I could say much much more (obviously) but I’ll leave it at that for now and go into more detail in future posts.

Anyway, around the same time that I read those novellas (in English), I decided to take some time off from school and travel around Europe with Zach. After bopping around for a while, we rented a room in an apartment in Barcelona and stayed there for a few months. Zach’s Spanish wasn’t very good at the time and he was on a poetry kick, so he bought me a copy of Los perros románticos, a collection of Bolaño’s poems, and asked me to translate it for him. I already had my eyes peeled for a translation project because I would need to complete one in order to graduate, so I gave it a shot.

Translating a book of poems is no small potatoes, so I figured I might as well milk it for all I could. I contacted Bolaño’s literary agent, was put in touch with New Directions in New York and somehow managed to get permission to translate the collection and submit my translations for publication. By the time I returned to school, I had completed most of the collection and Forrest Gander (a great poet/translator and also my advisor) helped me to edit them and polish a final draft. He also advised me through a translation of another collection of Bolaño’s poems, Tres, which will hopefully be published eventually (the opening series of prose poems “Prosa de otoño en Girona” is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing).

...

Great story on how the translator first discovered the work of her author and the circumstances leading to the publication of her translation.


Healy’s acclaim regarding the opening prose poems “Prosa de otoño en Girona” of Tres corresponds to that by another translator of the same cycle of prose poems. Chad W. Post of Three Percent interviewed Erica Mena, a translator who will publish her version of “Tales from the Autumn in Gerona” in the March issue of Words Without Borders. I can’t wait to read it. Erica Mena chose this project as her best translation to date, adding that B’s prose poetry is “much, much better” than his other poems. Bolañophiles alert!


I also wonder, like Chad W. Post, who will finally translate the entire book for publication.


What I’d like to happen is for the two translators, Healy and Mena, to complete their separate versions, and then we will have side by side two interpretations of what could really be one of B’s two best books.


To venture an opinion: I’m not surprised that B will excel in the form of prose poetry, a necessary hybrid that interleaves the savage spirit of his poetry within the sturdy clothing of prose.


But still, the question begs itself: Is Bolaño’s (other) best book yet to come in English language? Is it this much-vaunted, much-awaited (by me at least) Tres? The knight’s answer may or may not be the same as the knave’s. If we don’t trust Roberto, then I guess we should always trust his translators. After all, when Roberto asked the essential question: “How do we recognize a work of art?” he himself answered it without reservation:

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.

That rambling prose poem is your answer.

I can be led to believe that Tres is one of the two best books of Bolaño, the other being the rest of his oeuvre.

The Romantic Dogs (Roberto Bolaño)

The first book of Roberto Bolaño that I have read was The Savage Detectives. I was impressed with a book review of it that I asked C., a friend of mine, to hunt me down this book of Bolaño in Manila. That was last year.


And like a drop of mercy, The Savage Detectives was found in a used book shop. When it arrived I did not start reading it immediately. It’s quite hefty. The bulk of it warned me it’s one of those tomes that you would need to be very committed in order to finish.


It was not a breezy read. It took me about 5 months to finish. But in the midst of reading the book, the simple sentences acquired an undeniable power. The narrative became more and more inevitable. Something was coming alive and felt in the guts. The multitude of voices crowded in my head and a poetic universe opened up. Something just clicked in my mind, rearranged the atoms in me, and crystallized a certain resolve. I told myself, I have got to collect all of this author’s books.


After a bit more of my friend’s sleuthing, a copy of Bolaño’s Last Evenings on Earth was spotted in a bookstore. It was an anthology of short stories. I must really be lucky as his books were sold out in bookstores at that time. There must be a few copies available in the first place.


The Savage Detectives is about a group of young poets traipsing around the desert landscape of Mexico. The first part of the book (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico”) is in the form of a journal of one aspiring young poet. It introduces the major characters (all poets) in the book. It is a straightforward narrative charged with poetry recitations and with sex. Not a single poem of the characters is really written up in the book. And the sexual encounters are either awkward or interrupted. This part ended with the poets on a journey with a prostitute in tow to help her escape from the wrath of her pimp-lover.


The second part of the book (the novel’s title “The Savage Detectives”) is a series of interviews of dozens of characters scattered all over the Americas and Europe. The poets’ mission is revealed: to find a poetess who is believed to be the founder of "visceral realism," a literary movement that is being resurrected by the young poets. This section of the book spans two decades (1976-1996) of “detective work” and covered vast grounds of raw emotional feelings and mental wreckages.


The final part (“The Sonora Desert”) picks up the journal entries from where the first part left off, the poets still in search of the missing poetess while the betrayed pimp-lover is hot on their heels. The book which started on All Souls Day in 1975 ends here, in apocalyptic manner, a day after the Valentines Day of ’76. The unusual structure of the novel is something like a freestyle journal writing at the bookends with a chorus of tragedies and comedies in the middle. It's the stuff of poetry of high and low seriousness.


When I heard of another Bolaño book coming out, with the devilish title of 2666, I couldn’t let the first opportunity pass. I asked R., a friend of mine who is a book seller in the US, to secure a copy for me. It arrived beautifully, in a three-volume boxed set edition, just a few days after the New Year. I knew then that 2009 is going to be a good reading year for me.


2666 is a much longer (close to 900 pages) work and with a more non-linear plotting. Surprisingly, I find it an easier read than The Savage Detectives. If The Savage Detectives is a chorus, then 2666 is a concert. It is a concert of five subtly interconnected parts, whose fragmentation belies the singular design of its construction. At the time of its publication 2666 is considered unfinished, but a definitive version of each part is already prepared by the author before his death in 2003.


Yet again, in this brave book of visceral power, Bolaño plays with the novel form to populate a canvas with multiple characters. The characters are of different nationalities, they come and go like chess pieces, and they play against each other and against some of the darkest periods of twentieth century history. The book tells of another search for a missing writer, this time a novelist.


(This persistent theme of Bolaño, the obsessive search for a writer, is emblematic of his view of mythmaking and myth-breaking. It seems to suggest that the mere sight of the writer in question will cure the searchers’ obsession of the writer. As if the books read by the obsessives were not enough to produce the desired effects, as if seeing the writer of the admired books in full view, in motion, speaking to you, is the culmination of a literary journey. But we intuitively know this to be untrue. The search calls for something deeper than the satisfaction of literary curiosity. The search is only a metaphysical symptom of a lack of authentic experience. If Bolaño was still alive today, will readers have to search for him, too?)


At the start of 2666, we find four scholars in pursuit of the last traces of this vanished writer, again in the Mexican desert. The trail eventually went cold, and the book was suddenly flung in another direction. Defiantly digressive, the novel supplies new characters (all equally "lost") and new tangents of plot. The connection of each new part with the previous ones appear to be superficial at first, but it takes on a sinister shape once the novel completes its twisted knotting of the plotlines. The book's affinity with unspeakable and unnameable acts and silences is palpable. A monster is hiding in the barren desert.


What is remarkable with 2666 is its consistent standing in the large body of work that is Bolaño’s. The novels are for the most part concerned with writers and artists, and the characters appear from one novel to the next. They are recycled, reused, and reduced to different aspects of the same project. The books are self-referential and interlocking. Important motifs are given in one book and they recur or are amplified in the other texts. There are so few modern writers who are gifted with this ability to constitute an oeuvre that is its own complete universe. Who come to mind are W.G. Sebald and Javier Marías and, to some extent, J.M. Coetzee.


(To illustrate this allusiveness of Bolaño’s books currently available in English translations: The characters in 2666 appeared previously in works such as Nazi Literature in the Americas, the last chapter of which is expanded into the novella Distant Star. Amulet is also a reworking of a long monologue in The Savage Detectives, the characters in the latter also appearing Amulet and in Bolaño’s short stories collected in Last Evenings on Earth. The intriguing title of 2666, referring to a portentous year in the future, is also prefigured in Amulet and at the end of The Savage Detectives.


This leaves us with By Night in Chile, with no apparent connection with the rest of the books. But then this novella (the first book of Bolaño to appear in English and in its compact form is considered his most perfectly constructed work) quintessentially tackles the ethical roots of collaboration with the Pinochet regime. Evil, Nazism, and their slippery intertwining with letters and poetry are the prominent arcs of Bolañoland. By Night in Chile is hardly a fluke in the author’s visceral universe as it shares with the rest of his works the perpetual struggle of poets against historical and personal circumstances. Besides, Pablo Neruda appears hysterically in this book, and Bolaño has this intimate love-hate relationship with Neruda.)


For posterity’s sake, Bolaño in 2666 has given us a credo, or more precisely an exhortation, in which to measure literary ambitions for the present and future practitioners of the novel:

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Bolaño stretches the novel form to accommodate his fatalistic vision of men as self-destructing and destructive creatures. At the center of 2666 is the deployment of a brute force method of writing, to describe a series of murder reports on the violence inflicted against hundreds of women in the City of Sta. Teresa in Mexico. The gruesome mass-murder and rapes are based on the actual events in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The book unflinchingly depicts the graphic violence and its horrid details.


To see evil in the eye then, “amid blood and mortal wounds and stench,” is Bolaño’s abiding and dangerous preoccupation here. His poetic licence is devoted to the annulment of human complacence through numbness and a numbing experience of reading in discomfort. We are the missing witnesses of these heinous crimes and our testimonies are direly needed. It is cruel. It is offensive. And most important, it is human.


Horror is not the sole feature of the book. There are many facets to it that will feed a lot of bookish readers. Comedy is also present. It is potent and, well, comic. There are passages to incite horror, and forgiving passages to assuage the tedium. Sympathy, most of all, is not lacking. It is sympathy, tolerance, and human understanding that lift Bolaño’s book from the ruts of storytelling. It is the perennial absence of goodness that makes it more conspicuous. Albeit distributed in small measures, comedy and goodness functions like the lost poetry that is still remembered in the recesses of the mind.


In this matter, 2666 is comparable to The Savage Detectives whose non-inclusion of the characters’ own poems seems like an insidious joke. There are only three or four poems quoted in The Savage Detectives and the way they are delivered is probably timed to provoke a hoot. The first is a poem by Octavio Paz called “The Vampire,” after the reading of which, the narrator of the story couldn’t help to jack off. Another is a poem in French attributed to Rimbaud. The only "original" work in the novel is hardly a poem. It is a visual curiosity composed only of squiggles and lines. The joke, well-calculated, implies that surely there is really something serious and postmodern going on behind those lines.


Poetry in absentia functions like the hidden talisman that interprets everything that is lacking in The Savage Detectives. Poetry won’t save the world. And there is no indication yet that it can prevent the characters (and the readers) from completely becoming savages.






Which brings us to The Romantic Dogs, Bolaño’s first collection of poetry. This is a collection of nearly two decades of poems from 1980 to 1998. The translation into English is by Laura Healy and it came out last year. There are forty-odd poems presented in a bilingual edition, which makes it more transparent for Spanish speaking readers to deduce meanings that are otherwise lost in translation.


Bolaño was first of all a poet before branching out as a prose writer. This forced change in literary form was motivated by the practicalities of the writing trade. His stature as a novelist has somewhat eclipsed his outputs in verse. Despite the forced division between the two, the continuity in his literary projects can be viewed as occupying its proper niche. Whether in free verse or in free indirect style, his distinctive voice is heard in suspense. He may have articulated in The Romantic Dogs, for example, what his other poet-characters might have uttered in their romantic dreams.


The first poem, the title poem, speaks of a dream won by the poet, aged twenty, after having just “lost a country.” It announces a calling, presumably a poetic one, and hints that this collection will be autobiographical and will chart experiences of “growing up” which “back then … would have been a crime.”


Clearly this is a collection of love poems whose chosen emblem is a dog, man’s best friend but a lowly animal still. Politics and regimes, its cloak, are inescapable from the experience of poetry because the experience is a Latin American one. But at the same time, the tone strives for freedom from the ideological banality of history because the experience is also universal and, in the light of the poet’s path-breaking prose, bridges the global post-national territory.


The poems are about ceaseless and aimless wanderings, encounters with friends and lovers, casual sex, poverty, isolation, and dialogues with established poets. The existential baggage is delivered through the oblique telling of the anecdotes and loves of the twenty/twenty-something poet. The idealism and innocence of youth are being tested.


It is notable that the poet’s efforts at a conscious artistry, for such a highbrow subject as poetry and a dangerous calling as living on the edge, is peopled with individuals coming from low standing (prostitutes, vagrants, homosexuals, emigrants, and exiles), lowlifes who in their pathetic fates and decadence are pictured sympathetically in poetry even as they also took centerstage in the novels. Clearly the inner workings of Bolañoland are metaphorical identifications with the oppressed and their progress in this hostile civilization.


The backdrop of the poet’s romances is the dark undercurrents of history (Nazism, dictatorship, torture, kidnapping), which is often likened to a horror movie. The escape is often through sexual trysts but the comfort they bring is ephemeral, sometimes fake, and oftentimes they do not really bring comfort at all.

An unforgettable love
Beneath the rain
Beneath the sky bristling with antennas in which
17th century coffers coexist
With the shit of 20th century pigeons.
And in the middle
All the inextinguishable capacity to inflict pain,
Undefeated through years,
Undefeated through loves
Unforgettable.
Yes, that’s what she said.
An unforgettable love
And brief,
Like a hurricane?
No, a love brief as the sigh of a guillotined head,
The head of a king or Breton count,
Brief like beauty,
Absolute beauty,
That which contains all the world’s majesty and misery
And which is only visible to those who love.
(“La Francesa”)

(“Shit of birds”: In By Night in Chile, we encounter several episodes where the blood of birds was literally falling from the sky after being preyed upon by falcons. This massacre of the birds is undertaken by falconers, who are priests, to prevent the birds from defecating inside the old Catholic churches.)


Another major theme in the poems is the figure of the “detective,” who fastidiously contemplates the scene of the crime. Frozen and lost, desperate and crushed, this portrait of the poet as a detective is also a romantic notion as it borders on obsession. The detective, in various guises, is always present in the novels and novellas. In Distant Star, a detective was hired to hunt down an assassin poet who has been killing other poets. And who else will assist the detective but another poet commissioned to track down the whereabouts of the assassin by identifying his works in magazines and publications? In The Savage Detectives, the detectives are unidentified, but they can easily be the interviewers of the many characters (witnesses) in the second part of the book, or the interviewed people themselves, or the poet-characters who were in search of the missing poetess. They may even be the readers of the book who can't help but attempt to decipher the layers of meaning in it. Also teeming with detectives is 2666, most notable of which are a neophyte detective who was accidentally plunged into the action of the novel, another who tracks down a notorious serial transgressor of churches, and the detectives who are investigating the serial killings and violation of women.


For Bolaño, poetry (and by extension, his writings) is not so much a political statement but an ethical one. He is establishing the roots of his fiction and his art in various ways: as a detective, as a poet, and as a romantic. Each of these figures is the face of the same individual who sometimes finds himself at a loss while contemplating the modern horror movie that is constantly unfolding in the theatre of the living. The poet/detective/romantic is always on the road in search of the completion of a lost humanity, his and those of his kind.


In poetry as in prose, Bolaño is first rate. The Romantic Dogs shows that the novelist’s essence dwells in his poetry. It is possible to dissociate the poems from his novelistic writings, but the writings take on new meanings when read side by side with the poetry. Even if the book of poems is intended to be self-contained, its echoes and reverberations in the novels gravitate toward the comprehension of an incomplete and unfinished poetic universe. It may be entirely justified to treat the poems without reference to the torrential works of prose. But to do so is to remove the fuel from the fiction machine, to admit the defeat of true poetry.

The defeat of true poetry, which we write in blood.
And semen and sweat, says Darío.
And tears, says Mario.
Though none of us is crying.
(“Visit to the Convalescent”)

Yet the defeat is still one of two options. With so much disappointments and lost loves, the book can choose to end with the lost idealism of youth, with the loss of innocence, or with the plain lost of youth. But one can feign to detect a positive note ringing in the last poem “With the Flies”:

Poets of Troy
Nothing that could have been yours
Exists anymore


Not temples not gardens
Not poetry


You are free
Admirable poets of Troy

Perhaps a declaration of freedom is the only necessary thing for the modern poet to survive damning upheavals. His lost possessions are irretrievable, yet his verses are still intact. Here to stay with the romantic dogs.