Felipe Benítez Reyes tracks the nonsensical, disorienting, and rather tragicomic journey of three monarchs lost in a boundless desert, on a long, dark, and endless night, in which the notions of power, place, and purpose are all tipped on their heads and crushed

Felipe Benítez Reyes, The Errant Astrologers. Trans. by Emily Toder. Ugly Duckling Presse; Reprint ed., 2013.




This three-act play in verse by Spanish poet, novelist, and dramaturge Felipe Benítez Reyes, tracks the nonsensical, disorienting, and rather tragicomic journey of three monarchs lost in a boundless desert, on a long, dark, and endless night, in which the notions of power, place, and purpose are all tipped on their heads and crushed. In a paradoxically classic fusion of the chivalrous and postmodern traditions, THE ERRANT ASTROLOGERS is like waiting for Godot with Sancho Panza, all on the set of Ishtar, and told in the haunting, rich verse of Reyes's own.

The blind night,

and the moon that is the eye of the blind night,

the eye that looks at me

with the white look of the blind,

because the night is blind,

and the moon is the blind eye that looks at me

and sees me not.

I wander blinded by the blind night.

I ?oat in the darkness

as the moon ?oats,

the blind eye,

and the blind night,

and the blind moon as well,

the useless eye,

and I wander blind,

invisible in this great dimness of blind theatre.

Felipe Benítez Reyes' The Errant Astrologers, a "legend in verse in three acts," follows three "astrologers" (wayward kings, more like it) as they seek a wandering star from a shared dream. Much of the legend finds the kings winding through the wilderness, having abandoned their kingdoms and engaging in philosophic, playful, and sometimes violent dialogue. It becomes clear during the play that, while the sought-after star is their destination, it mostly represents an unknown for the characters. This unknown also becomes a quality reflected in the verse, which itself sometimes meanders.
The book ably floats between the genres of poetry and playwriting, while not calling attention to its floating; this must be part of its appeal: its neither-nor-ness. It indulges in ambiguity, but the prose is approachable; it is neither a strict narrative nor a strictly abstract or philosophical text, but a little of each. Reyes' style shifts between that of an epic poem or ballad:

I, King Damascón,
who has heard the feet of death splash about
in the springs of blood, when the battleground became a red whirlpool.

and at times the language is folkloric, fable-like:

…my feet ask me each night:
"Where will you take us at sunrise,
my lord?"

There is also a touch of the unfamiliar and the strange, both in language and narrative. Each of the kings is given a defined character: Damascón, the tyrant; Amerín, the fool; Kagba, the sensitive empath. But while we immediately recognize these characters in their roles, none of them seems real. The only indication of their existence is their acknowledgement of one another; otherwise, we can only trust their apparently thin proclamations of their own importance to their kingdoms. The kings' speech is often highly dramatic, and makes little reference to the material world. The aim of their dialogue, it sometimes seems, is to establish themselves in a vaporous environment; this, paired with their non-sequiturs and circular banter, gives a dreamlike feeling to the bare scenery.
Though present, the play's moments of surrealism and allusions to figures such as Jesus Christ and Lear are faint enough to resist pinning it down into a singular genre or discussion. The book is clearly rooted in a literary tradition, and offers a quietly political warning against the futility of ownership and of following costly, unattainable ideals:

Look at a golden crown
in the light of the moon
and it will seem a trinket.
Look at a silver necklace
in the plain light of day
and its poverty will shock you.

but its politics, too, seem to be shielded in order to protect it from the stigmatization that would also threaten to pigeonhole it. It's timely in that way.
The experience of reading Reyes' work is multiple: feeling let in on a private chance encounter between power-wielding strangers, getting lost among spoken and actual circumambulation, and drifting outside the parameters of the book's world that, like Calvino's Invisible Cities, is built of materials recognizable to us but constructed in such a way that it feels alien, mesmerizing. It is just beyond the reach of reality, and carries a secrecy about it that makes its initial seeming-simplicity a bit deceptive. It's a world worth the investment it takes to live within it for a short time. - Jamie Edlin

The Errant Astrologers reviewed in Boog City

Felipe Benítez Reyes (1960, Cádiz), is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. The author of many highly-acclaimed works, he is one of the most influential voices in contemporary Spanish literature. He has earned various literary distinctions, among them, the Luis Cernuda prize, the Nadal Prize, and the National Book Award and the National Critics Award for his 1996 collection Vidas improbables (of which an English translation was published by BOA Editions in 2006). He lives in the town of Rota, Andalusia, with his wife, the translator Silvia Barbero.