Miguel Ángel Bustos - language is both a tool of subjugation and a device to conjure a strange world that transcends the one we only think we know. And like a postcolonial Rimbaud, he repurposes symbols to develop his own: universal, synesthetic, and above all, musical. Polyvocal, intertextual, and hybrid in form, these books span aphoristic fragments, prose poems, lyrical prose chapters, and linguistically experimental free verse

Miguel Ángel Bustos, Vision of the Children of Evil, Trans. by Lucina Schell, co-im-press, 2018.            


Simultaneously prophetic and blasphemous, Vision of the Children of Evil by Miguel Ángel Bustos presents a mystical rejoinder to the inequities of the Americas, a revision of history through the motif of divine descent, as relevant and revolutionary today as when the poems first debuted in the 1960s. In Bustos's poetry, language is both a tool of subjugation and a device to conjure a strange world that transcends the one we only think we know. And like a postcolonial Rimbaud, he repurposes symbols to develop his own: universal, synesthetic, and above all, musical. Polyvocal, intertextual, and hybrid in form, these books span aphoristic fragments, prose poems, lyrical prose chapters, and linguistically experimental free verse, voicing Spanish colonizers and invented indigenous characters alike. In this bilingual dual edition featuring both Fantastical Fragments (1965) and Vision of the Children of Evil (1967), anglophone readers have their first opportunity to experience Bustos's poetry, as the poet fell victim to a double silencing in Argentina—he was disappeared at the beginning of the 1976 military dictatorship and, subsequently, his work was suppressed and his name absented from the literary record. Lucina Schell's translations are nothing short of extraordinary—urgent, adept, and possessing the necessary temerity to match wits with a poetic voice as strident as Bustos's. A poète maudit whose untimely death was ironically brought on by his leftist politics, Miguel Ángel Bustos reinvents the origin myth of Argentina—and the Americas—laying bare all its promise, all its pain.


This essential voice of a "disappeared" poet from the brutal period of Argentina's Dirty War is electrifying. Miguel Ángel Bustos's poetry shakes me with its aching sense of existential abandonment—just as "a land that trembles like the lung of a boy." His work is populated with demons, vampires, fantastical cabinets, hallucinations, llamas, condors, tigers, a word-womb of prophecy, the Legion of the Children of Evil, and "the rust on the nail that eats at you." His dark visions exhilarate, infect, inflame. Like César Vallejo or Alejandra Pizarnik, he is a poet who eats radiance even as night falls in his poems (to paraphrase him). A poet, journalist, and anthropologist, he diagnoses society's diseases and trumpets the damage they do to the human soul. Writing at a time when Argentina was plunging into horrifying repression in a series of violent coups, Bustos fuses the eerie visions of Baudelaire, Nerval, and Poe with the prophetic tones of Milton and Blake. Bustos's prediction held true: "When I die, the prophet in me will rise like a child without morals or motherland." I'm grateful for Lucina Schell's artful rendering that recreates the visceral yet oneiric impetus and the adroit wordplay of Bustos's poems. The appearance of this translation is an event to celebrate. —Rachel Galvin

Like the tormented Peruvian César Vallejo or the Spanish madman-savant Leopoldo Panero, Argentina's Miguel Ángel Bustos ransacks the unconscious for its darkest revelations of the inexpressible. Like García Lorca forty years before in Spain, Bustos was murdered for his politics in 1976 by his country's military dictatorship. To render his hallucinated language and his dream-nightmare visions in credible English, Lucina Schell reaches for the edges of expression and introduces us to a strangely gifted, wildly imaginative, prematurely silenced twentieth-century voice.
—Stephen Kessler

The radiant, devastating poetry of Miguel Ángel Bustos reads as a glorious act of resistance to Argentina's dictadura, and to all brutal takeovers of language and reality that attempt to deaden us with clichĂ© and denial. We can be certain: "the world had changed with his howl. With his strange howl." And "were a monument to a howl possible," it would no doubt be Lucina Schell's dazzling, courageous translation, which never for a moment flinches from difficulty as she delivers this piercing, perturbing message from history. This book has moved me unspeakably. What a masterpiece, and what a spectacular translation!—Michelle Gil-Montero

Miguel Ángel Ramón Bustos von Joecker, un poeta desaparecido, a victim of Argentina's Dirty War, reappears, is made visible to the anglophone reader, in this splendid translation of his book of poems, Visión de los hijos del mal. The translator, Lucina Schell, presents us these beautiful remains of the murdered poet, the words that survived him like the exhumed dead calcium of his very body: "When I die / beneath the inhumane song of my/brothers / I'll be a relic urine smell. / I'll remain in my bones for all / eternity. Amen."—Arturo Mantecón

Bustos is a major poet and Vision of the Children of Evil is an important book, not only for our time, but, well, all. Lucina Schell's translations are a gift: thoughtful, imaginative, faithful, smart.—Mark Statman

“A dream interprets me. Whether it understands me, I’m not sure,’’ goes the 18th aphorism of the opening pages of Miguel Ángel Bustos’ Vision of the Children of Evil (Visión de los Hijos del Mal) in the English translation by Lucina Schell. Vision of the Children of Evil is forthcoming in a dual edition with Schell’s translation of Bustos’ book Fantastic Fragments (Fragmentos Fantásticos), this fall from independent publisher co•im•press.

Was Bustos the prophet of his own detention and disappearance? There is an uncanny sense of it in many poems, such as the self-deprecating “A Horizontal Job.”

Poor Miguel Ángel. I’ve always said he had the worst luck. There are lucky dogs — but he’s one unlucky dog.

He had looked for work. The offices emery-polished and the banks full. He had looked with the utmost sadness.

One day he crossed an avenue — Corrientes, I believe, or 9 de Julio — and disappeared.

Thanks to Lucina Schell’s translation, we begin to explore that very question in the language that wrote Sherlock Holmes.

Translation, in a most basic understanding, is an interpretative act. They say of a pianist, like Argentinean Martha Argerich playing Chopin or Schumann, that she is ‘’the interpreter.’’ Is translation interpretation of written music, so that it can be heard? Is it an interpenetration of worlds seemingly impossible to connect? After having read his original texts in Spanish, reading newly-completed English translations of the Argentinean poète maudit, Miguel Ángel Bustos’s works Vision of the Children of Evil , gave a hair-raising experience, like seeing an open book through very clear water, submerged yet with swimming. It was akin to reading William S. Burroughs’ harrowing opioid-dream Naked Lunch for the very first time as a teenager, when the curiosity to explore narcotics usually dawns, alongside the want of serious books, in a healthy young person needing to de-school.

Some short lines, aphorisms in Bustos’ Fragmentos Fantásticos, bring to mind the last collection of texts Kafka wrote, a book of aphorisms Max Brod called The Zurau (naming it after the rural place in West Bohemia). Kafka liked to say of Dostoyevsky, “we are blood brothers.’’ Maybe Miguel-Ángel Bustos, vanished poet whose remains were found in 2014 by forensic examiners, could have passed some literary DNA exam and been proven a blood brother to the tubercolic writer of the Zurau, at least when it comes such aphorisms as Bustos’ “When my father died, his oblivion was born’’ (Aphorism 7 of Kafka). Lines of Kafka’s Zurau, such as, “A cage went out into the world, in search of a bird,” may find more resonance and counterpoint in Bustos’ surreal writings rather than his confessional ones, in language at once veiled and revelatory.

Schell’s translation is reluctant toward categories and easy syntheses, weary of simple definitions of any thing — a North American who flung herself for years into the dark history and present of Argentina, learning the obscure dialect of Argentine “ríoplatense.’’ The Spanish of the Río de la Plata seems to have become an innate, basic understanding of that gut-wrenching history, and remotest of countries (of which her interviewer is a citizen and byproduct). Yet she can confidently admit that Bustos, as well as Burroughs were “poètes maudits,’’ whose work lives in a reverberation with the hallucinatory and surrealist dark voyages begun with Charles Baudelaire’s syphilitic inscriptions like “Spleen’’ and “Les Fleurs du Mal.’’ Arthur Rimbaud’s quest (not a Google-search!) for the “alchemy of the word.”

Another, more recent poète maudit would be poet Franz Wright, whom Schell acknowledges as a possible Anglo companion to Miguel Ángel Bustos. A poet who seemed to have prophesied the way he would die. He was a maldito, maudit, damned in the most direct sense: many stanzas indicate an acute foreknowledge of the way he would end. There are the growling police hounds, the persecution, the cell, the oblivion, the river.

The collected poems are imbued, as Schell points out, with the knowledge of there being many fates worse than death. That is an innately Argentinean knowledge, an instruction given by the humid air of the Pampas, shaping the Argentinean talent for death. To get good at it, it is first required to learn of worse in the spectrum of possibilities — for otherwise we would mystify it, like amateurs. Bustos, a mystic, speaks of taking off this life “like a blood-soaked shirt.’’

The original maudit, Rimbaud, sadly withdrew at age 20 from his poetic striving, took off his blood-soaked poet’s shirt in favor of piracy and weapons-trading near the gulf of Yemen — perhaps a much more highly-revenue’d endeavor; perhaps Rimbaud was so full of poetry he needed to seek the escape out of it.

Miguel Ángel Bustos’ Pan-American nomadism was not a journey away from poetry. His search was not for the Wagnerian grail of Argentinian romantic nationalism that produced part of the Creole poetry of the 19th century. Bustos, rather, sought that “alchemy of the word,’’ genuine degenerate art. His paeans seek those who were destroyed by Argentina. This, next to his participation in revolutionary politics and journalism, secured the paranoid wrath of the Argentinean military regime that grabbed power in 1976 from ousted President Isabela Martínez-Perón, herself a right-wing ruler whose “Triple A,” Argentinian Anticommunist Alliance of intelligence agents and gunmen had been tracking and monitoring dissidents like Bustos and other poets and those politically or intellectual active as potential “public enemies.’’

Bustos died in 1976, a captive in the ESMA prison camp under the first junta led by Jorge Rafael Videla. We know today, because of the discovery of his remains in 2014, that the poet was shot by firing squad. Long before his death, Bustos wrote, in a state he claimed was one resembling the possession of a medieval exorcism, that he would live on in his bones, a relic, perhaps dropped in a bright river.

Bustos wrote and drew labyrinthine traveler's chronicles about the Andes countries. These are interspersed with what resemble psychonaut travels through hyperspace dimensions and through time, meetings with angels who have names like “Ataíl.’’ Pan-Americanism led Bustos in and painfully out of love in Lima and in Argentina, through the doors of a psychiatric hospital, where he met Argentinean poet Jacobo Fijman who, perhaps, led Bustos to write “with the soft tenderness of the mad. The sweetness of the crazies of this world,” as Bustos put it. (Fijman is the subject of a future piece in the series Notes on a Journey to the Ever-Dying Lands, along with Ángel Escobar, Marisa Wagner and other “Manicomio Liber poets.’’)

The notion of travel, today, carries airs of convention: “air-miles,’’ a deceptive leisure-artifice of middle-class life. But in Bustos’ Argentina, (and after his disappearance, until the globalization of the 1990s) most Argentinians had never visited a foreign country beyond Uruguay; a scarce few had followed the river Paraná past the Brazilian border in Porto Alegre. Chile was often an enemy, walled off by Andes. Isolation made the world beyond Argentina’s borders seem a baroque map from Borges’ stories and bestiaries. The Argentine consciousness was once shaped by such isolation. Deserts in the provinces north decked with salt and sand, and deserts south and center resemble Mars, and standing deracinated of most original nomadic populations. The absence of Mapuche, Ona, Calchaqui peoples and their Incan conquerors left an emptiness that Bustos deemed unbearable. In the second poem of “Arrangement of Time Without Dimension,’’ Bustos says to his mother who raised him Catholic (cited from Schell’s translation):

“Mother I was Christian like those who landed before on these shores.
 I sleep on a cross
 I die on a cross the cross was the first cry

I heard arriving in this world.
 Cross of the most sorrowful blood.
 Men have climbed the cross. Transformed into

mute gods. Tied in bronze and crystal they cry out.

Naturally I won’t untie anyone so weak poor corpse” (continues, p. 47)

But the emptiness that causes that pain is Outer, carved by campaigns led by 19th century generals who hoped in vainglory to prove the country could be “modernized’’ to attract foreign investors. The dynastic and family heirs of accomplished killers like Martínez de Hoz and the Bullrich family loom over the Argentine population to this day, recently finding their way from their sprawling ranches into national security and elected office. Shadows accumulate like blood-soaked shirts that somehow do not diminish, are never pulled off completely. There is no exorcism of the emptiness.

Travels while writing and enacting near-shamanic investigations gave Miguel-Ángel the inner experience that the artist seeks more than mere “Real Life’’ experience. In Brazil, Bustos experimented writing in Portuguese, in coastal rhythms and Brazilian concrete poetry. Many of his more visionary poems are like maps of the fallen colossus of the Andean cultures and their destruction at the hands of conquistadors, mourning the Inca’s and Mapuche people’s bloodshed. That subject fed many of his psychedelic prose-pieces (also in the forthcoming Vision of the Children of Evil) that tell of travel across time, possession by witnesses to the time of the early colonization, accompanied by angels with warped Semitic names, as well as Incan and pre-Columbian gods.

Despite his hatred of the conquistador and his self-hate at being a white Creole, much of his poetry expresses what reads as a heretical Christian mysticism, a modernist, revolutionary continuation of that archaic Spanish tradition of “the Long dark night of the soul,’’ by St. Juan de la Cruz. Born Miguél Ángel Ramón Bustos Von Joecker, this poet of Spanish and German immigrant descent also shares a common element with Sylvia Plath, who wrote of her father’s Nazi lampshade and her Jewish Taroc pack, as well as Franz Wright, who was also partly of German-American descent (he liked to say “the Germans get straight to the point: Selbst-Mord, Self-Murder, the German word for suicide). In all three of these Pan-American poets, a Germanic gene became a point of torment for thinkers who were conscientious and spiritual in confronting colossal crimes, all making the case for personal survival and humor, they ultimately abandoned all illusions of innocence, embracing despair.

Comparisons to other mystic poets also hold: a poem of a vision from the North of Argentina — a chorus of llamas, and a condor who is asked to pass a test — recalls the poem Conference of the Birds by Iranian Sufi mystic Farid ud-Din Attar. - Arturo Desimone

https://medium.com/anomalyblog/was-miguel-ángel-bustos-the-argentinean-poet-who-prophesied-his-own-death-59a6c6435048

Miguel Ángel Bustos (1932-1976) was a major poet of the Argentine Generation of 1960, an illustrator, and a literary critic. During his lifetime, he published Cuatro Murales (1957), Corazón de piel afuera (1959), Fragmentos fantásticos (1965), Visión de los hijos del mal (1967), winner of the second Buenos Aires Municipal Prize for Poetry, and El Himalaya o la moral de los pájaros (1970). Bustos's last book was published with the support of a grant from the National Foundation for the Arts. His poetry was included in many contemporaneous anthologies of the Generation of 1960, and in 1998 Alberto Szpunberg published the anthology of his poetry Despedida de los ángeles. Bustos studied painting with Juan Battle Planas in the 1960s and had a solo exhibition of his artworks in 1970, with a catalog written by Aldo Pellegrini. In 2014, Miguel Ángel Bustos and Emiliano Bustos had a joint exhibition of their paintings and drawings at the Centro Cultural Borges in Buenos Aires. During the 1970s, Bustos worked primarily as a literary critic for Siete Días, Panorama, La Opinión, and El Cronista Comercial, and his collected prose was published in 2007. His collected poetry was published in 2008, the first time it had appeared in print in more than thirty years. On May 30, 1976, Bustos was arrested by military police and for decades remained "disappeared," his work censored. In 2014, Bustos's remains were identified by forensic anthropologists. It is now known that he was executed by firing squad on June 20, 1976.