Rodrigo Lira, Testimony of Circumstances, Trans. by Thomas Rothe and Rodrigo Olavarría, Cardboard House Press, 2018.
excerpt (Asymptote)
“4 Three Hundred and Sixty Fives and One 366 Elevens” by Rodrigo Lira. The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation
“The true heir of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn’s protégé, Rodrigo Lira is still considered a cult author in Chile. Halfway between the figure of the madman and the genius, halfway between the myth and the legend, Lira wrote poems that were authentic, weird and precious gems. Owner of a unique style, combining irony, intertextuality, and a sharp sense of humor, Lira was an absolute underground poet, whose work was circulated by hand in thousands of Xerox copies that flooded the most notorious university campuses in Santiago de Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Now, for the very first time, his poems are available in English thanks to the bold, delicate and meticulous translation of Rodrigo Olavarría (the only authorized voice of Allen Ginsberg in Spanish) and Thomas Rothe (translator of Jaime Huenún’s Fanon City Meu). I don’t think there is a way to fully understand contemporary Chilean poetry without having read Rodrigo Lira’s exquisite and extravagant poems.”—Carlos Soto-Román
"Rodrigo Lira’s elegance, his disdain, make him off limits for any publisher. The cowardly don’t publish the brave."—Roberto Bolaño
“Rodrigo Lira’s ‘Testimony of Circumstances‘ is vicious. In it, Lira mocks the literary establishment, depicts life under Pinochet’s regime, and narrates his experiences with mental illness. This tour de force poem is densely allusive, parodic, and endlessly playful.” —Aditi Machado, Asymptote
I try to write these reviews from a perspective of cultural implication and value. That is to say, while all the technical matters of structure and diction and execution are very important, I try to emphasize the potential emotional and philosophical resonance of a work, not in a manner that tells you how to feel but to convey that the work in question has the capacity to affect at least one person on a profound level. The risk of approaching texts in this way is that, as you can probably imagine, the intimacy of this effect can wound in unexpected ways. We all build our defenses, even the most empathic among us, and yet no defense is absolute. No heart is immune to vulnerability. It is in this context, unwittingly confident in my inadequate preparedness, that I read Testimony of Circumstances, a compilation of the poetry of Rodrigo Lira, a Chilean poet whose reputation seems equal parts famous and infamous.
http://angelcityreview.com/testimony-of-circumstances/
Rodrigo Lira was born in Santiago, in 1949. He studied philosophy, psychology, arts, communication arts, linguistics, and philology, among other things, but he never graduated. An eccentric fellow, he never published a book while he was alive. His poems, though, were spread by hand, around different university campuses, where he used to hang out with other poets and friends. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Rodrigo committed suicide in 1981, on the day of his thirty-second birthday. Conisdered a cult figure, his fame most of the time prevents a serious assessment of the real importance of his work.
In 2010, the young translators Rodrigo Olavarría and Thomas Rothe received a grant from Chile’s Ministry of Culture to translate the poetry of Rodrigo Lira into English. The project, which includes over twenty poems of various lengths, is in its final stages of revision and currently seeking a US publishing house to print a bilingual edition. Thomas Rothe (Berkeley, California, 1985), who’s been living in Chile for almost ten years, generously accepted to respond to three questions about Lira’s work and biography, as well as the translation process. He holds an MA in Latin American and Chilean Literature from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He has translated poetry into both English and Spanish, including an anthology of contemporary US poets, La alteración del silencio (Cuneta, 2011), in collaboration with Galo Ghigliotto.
Can you describe briefly the myth of Rodrigo Lira? What’s the importance of his poetry? And what’s his place in Chilean literature?
Rodrigo Lira’s suicide on December 26, 1981, fostered much of the myth surrounding him as a poète maudit. And in fact his life reveals the reasons this label attached to him — a diagnosis of schizophrenia, social and literary marginality, as well as a taste for marijuana, more reminiscent of Beat poets than his Chilean contemporaries in the 1970s and early 80s. Having never published a book of poems while alive not only adds to the aura of a misunderstood poet, but also provides few records of critical attention with which to reconstruct the story of his life, a task that has been pursued mainly by gathering the personal accounts of friends, family, and fellow writers. These circumstances have also blurred the lines between myth and reality, which seems to have been Lira’s literary proposition.
Looking over the unclassifiable work Lira left behind, one thing becomes clear: his desire to enter the pantheon of Chilean literature was overcome by a desire to deface its engravings and cause laughter in doing so. And laughter introduced a new face into the somber drama so characteristic of national poetry up until the 1970s. Whereas many of Lira’s poems may resemble Nicanor Parra’s antipoetry or traces of the Chilean neo-avant-garde movement (Raúl Zurita, Juan Luis Martínez, Diamela Eltit, among others), Lira took parody and literary collages to such an extreme he often found no point of return or closure, marking a fine line between admiration and aversion for other, more established writers. He explored the limits and intensity of language in a way that also reflects and responds to the context of widespread censorship imposed by Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. Maybe that’s why Enrique Lihn, who himself maintained a somewhat turbulent friendship with Lira, considered his poetry unsettling, meant to keep us awake instead of dreaming.
Three years after Lira’s death, a group of friends compiled his manuscripts into what became his first book, Project of a Complete Works (Proyecto de obras completas), which has gone through several reprintings by different publishing houses. And in 2006, previously unpublished texts appeared in Sworn Declaration (Declaración jurada), expanding the interest in his work as well as the myth behind — or in front of — the poet. I would say that today, the enigmatic character Lira cultivated during a time of extreme silence and confusion continues to evoke ambiguity, intrigue, and laughter, though his name no longer occupies a marginal place in Chilean literature. I would also venture to say that the work of poets such as Lihn, Parra, Zurita, and Diego Maquieira, and certainly that of younger generations, cannot be fully understood without the presence of Lira’s persona and poetry.
Lira’s poetry is extremely colloquial and informal. Irony and intertextuality were important devices in his work. What challenges did you face when translating his poems?
One of the most striking traits of Lira’s writing is how much it draws from local references, whether urban markers in Santiago, the work of other writers and critics, or language. Chile’s unique geography as a long stretch of country locked between mountain range and sea has had a major influence in distinguishing the Chilean accent and dialect from other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. On top of that, Lira was born into an upper middle-class family, spent most of his life in Santiago, and belonged to the university scene, constantly interacting with young people, allowing him access to the argot of these geographic and sociocultural groups. And he exhausts that language, proving himself a master of local slang. This clearly posed a challenge for bringing many of his texts into English, and we had to accept the impossibility of “faithfully” translating many sections, which actually serves as a useful lesson for any translation. For the most part, words and phrases that refer to specific things often have to become more generalized and therefore lose part of their meaning, but at the same time broaden the interpretations. An example of this can be found in a poem where Lira describes festivities taking place during the “semana premechona,” literally the welcome week for first-year students at the University of Chile. To avoid obstructing the rhythm of the poem and tedious explanations, we thought it best that the setting simply be a freshmen week, allowing the reader to imagine such activities and celebrations at any university, whether they actually share similarities or not. Another example is in the title of the poem “4 tres cientos sesenta y cincos y un 366 de onces,” where, as you know, the last word in italics refers to the number eleven and also a traditional Chilean evening meal. In the English version we lose the double meaning, opting to express the importance of the number, which we believe refers to a specific date — September 11, 1973, the day of the military coup that ousted Salvador Allende. This sort of wordplay constantly appears throughout Lira’s poetry, and our renderings were made on a case-by-case basis but often accept the loss of certain nuances so present in the originals.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that we whitewashed these poems. Some are very dense, and we have intentionally kept them that way in their English versions. One of the most difficult tasks of translating poetry is not to fall back on the strategy of standardizing the language, making it overly readable or only concentrating on transmitting some sort of message from the poem. With that in mind, we have attempted to render these texts as accessible as possible to a broad readership while maintaining the intensity of language Lira developed as a trademark.
Other challenges included translating neologisms and rhymes, which in many cases we overcame with the help of dictionaries and thesauruses. One particular poem which merited almost constant dictionary referral was “Es Ti Pi,” or “Ess Tee Pee,” in English. The poem, often deemed “untranslatable,” consists of some five pages where each verse includes three words beginning with the letters S, T, and P, in that order. Attempting to follow the content of this brilliantly disturbing poem, English syntax clearly made it impossible to reproduce the narrative techniques used in the text. Again, this meant accepting the loss of nuances but, more than ever in this case, recreating a text in which Lira’s pen brings new possibilities to the English language.
Why do you think it is necessary to have his poetry available in English? What do you think the English-speaking reader will find in his work?
The most obvious objective is to extend the reach of this poetry beyond the linguistic borders of Spanish. Read in its historical and political context, Lira’s work expresses a response to the suffocating environment of the 70s and 80s in Chile, offering stories, sensations, and atmospheres that history books are unable to capture. We hope this poetry will help English speakers understand the complexity of recent Chilean history and, in general, that of the Southern Cone, where several other countries simultaneously experienced right-wing dictatorships. From a strictly literary perspective, Lira’s parodies of internationally recognized Chilean poets (Neruda, Mistral, De Rokha, Huidobro, and Parra) could complement perceptions of their work and its impact among Chilean writers of younger generations. Even Roberto Bolaño, who has experienced a boom among English-speaking readers over the last decade, wrote several pieces in praise of Lira, suggesting he could possibly be the last poet of Chile or Latin America — this is a very Bolañoesque exaggeration but displays his profound respect and admiration.
On the other hand, from a less utilitarian approach, the very process of translating Lira’s poetry into a different language and cultural context implies introducing new poetic forms into that language. This doesn’t mean Lira’s poetry will change the English language, but rather that the poetry assumes a new meaning capable of becoming a reference, miniscule as it may be, for poetry and literature written in English. Walter Benjamin believed translation allowed the original work to move into an afterlife, a different stage of existence with new possibilities. At the core of this idea, Benjamin is criticizing attempts to “faithfully” reproduce works of literature in different languages, defending the need for translation to change and renew the original. I like to think our renderings of Lira’s poetry head in this direction. I also tend to think Lira would have found it amusing to hear someone associate the idea of afterlife with his poetry, which he may have wanted to translate himself if he were still alive. Lira spoke English quite fluently and even wrote an untitled poem in English, which has not been included in any of his posthumous publications. It begins with these lines:
ARS POÉTIQUE
http://jacket2.org/commentary/rodrigo-lira
Rodrigo Lira was born in Santiago in 1949. He gained notoriety during the seventies for his dramatic public readings and eccentric parodies of many established Chilean poets. Tormented by a diagnosis of schizophrenia as well as social marginalization, he committed suicide in 1981, on his thirty-second birthday. After his death and the posthumous publication of his first collection of poems, Proyecto de obras completas, interest in Lira’s poetry and life grew exponentially into a cult following that has influenced many younger generations of Chilean poets and writers. Combining erudite literary knowledge, intense language, and dark burlesque humor, Lira’s work is often compared to contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. Roberto Bolaño described him as “one of the last poets of Latin America.”
“4 Three Hundred and Sixty Fives and One 366 Elevens” by Rodrigo Lira. The Brooklyn Rail’s InTranslation
“The true heir of Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn’s protégé, Rodrigo Lira is still considered a cult author in Chile. Halfway between the figure of the madman and the genius, halfway between the myth and the legend, Lira wrote poems that were authentic, weird and precious gems. Owner of a unique style, combining irony, intertextuality, and a sharp sense of humor, Lira was an absolute underground poet, whose work was circulated by hand in thousands of Xerox copies that flooded the most notorious university campuses in Santiago de Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Now, for the very first time, his poems are available in English thanks to the bold, delicate and meticulous translation of Rodrigo Olavarría (the only authorized voice of Allen Ginsberg in Spanish) and Thomas Rothe (translator of Jaime Huenún’s Fanon City Meu). I don’t think there is a way to fully understand contemporary Chilean poetry without having read Rodrigo Lira’s exquisite and extravagant poems.”—Carlos Soto-Román
"Rodrigo Lira’s elegance, his disdain, make him off limits for any publisher. The cowardly don’t publish the brave."—Roberto Bolaño
“Rodrigo Lira’s ‘Testimony of Circumstances‘ is vicious. In it, Lira mocks the literary establishment, depicts life under Pinochet’s regime, and narrates his experiences with mental illness. This tour de force poem is densely allusive, parodic, and endlessly playful.” —Aditi Machado, Asymptote
During his lifetime, Chilean-poet Rodrigo Lira never saw the cult-following that his poetry would achieve, and still, in much of North America and for most English readers, he remains an unknown. Translators Thomas Rothe and Rodrigo Olavarría, and Cardboard House Press, have righted this with the release of Lira’s Testimony of Circumstances. In this bilingual edition, which closely follows Lira’s posthumous Proyecto de obras completas, but with notable additions—one from which it takes its title—Rothe and Olavarría have reformed his poems in English with attention and care that captures the frenetic energy of Lira’s work. Their opening translator’s note offers key historical and biographical contexts and illuminates their perspicacious attention to, and labor over Lira’s poetry.
There’s nothing simple about Rodrigo Lira’s multilayered and intertextual lyric-poetry. His long stretching poems slip in various other languages; obscure references; and use playful, inventive word-play—not to mention a catalogue of footnotes and meta-poetic turns. Apart from the richness of his stylistic verse, his poetry communicates both a personal and a social pain, paralleled by loneliness. The first poem, “Grecia 907, 1975,” even begins with his speaker’s long hypothetical scream, in response to bureaucracy, etc. “Any moment now / my patience will snap and I’ll scream” and it is a scream so powerful that it both destroys and amasses with other voices: “the effects of my scream will multiply once all / the kooks start screaming and I’ll have accomplices . . .” Lira manifests a cold frustration for formal society and the government, and then a pride for the people of Chile too, particularly for the youth: “let us lift / up / our / hearts, because / —although this era isn’t giving birth to even half of one, / school girls keep drawing them / on their knapsacks / and now that practically no one tags / bathroom walls, / in Santiago de Chile, at least, / Young people / write.”
Lira may have written in the 70s, in response to the oppressive climate of his own government, but hold his poetry up and it is an unnerving lens for the present day, America and elsewhere. We should all take up the pen, like Lira, write against the suffocation of the factory, but first, turn to Testimony of Circumstances, enter into conversations with Lira and beat back our solitary sub-lives, choose to hear, more than survive.
https://www.arkint.org/testimony-of-circumstances-capsule-review/I try to write these reviews from a perspective of cultural implication and value. That is to say, while all the technical matters of structure and diction and execution are very important, I try to emphasize the potential emotional and philosophical resonance of a work, not in a manner that tells you how to feel but to convey that the work in question has the capacity to affect at least one person on a profound level. The risk of approaching texts in this way is that, as you can probably imagine, the intimacy of this effect can wound in unexpected ways. We all build our defenses, even the most empathic among us, and yet no defense is absolute. No heart is immune to vulnerability. It is in this context, unwittingly confident in my inadequate preparedness, that I read Testimony of Circumstances, a compilation of the poetry of Rodrigo Lira, a Chilean poet whose reputation seems equal parts famous and infamous.
UNQUESTIONABLY beyond poetry (sic), / but certainly in the reach of originality, / European of the post-war era (…!) / were already experimenting with these gags / around 1950.To those with a cursory knowledge of Chilean poetry, Lira’s name probably won’t be included in the list of those who first come to mind. His list of published credits is comparatively small and awareness of his work was largely a product of the local performative scenes in Chile. By all accounts that I could find, including the introduction to this collection, he is described as being at times endearing and loyal, at times abrasive and rude. Indeed, he seems a person of contradictions: he was born into financial, social, and educational privilege and yet a supporter of Salvador Allende’s nationalization policies; he will demand and beg for acceptance by his peers while critiquing them and their work, often in the same poem; he was known for his outspoken manner and perspective but also at times reclusive and afraid for his life. As you have probably gathered, there is some speculation that he had manic depressive disorder, and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia (thought admittedly in an age where that tended to be a catchall mental diagnosis). But he was a being of words, in the purest literary sense, and despite his struggles, he has produced works of incredible beauty.
De modo que a veces es preciso o preferible moverse / lo menos posible para evitar tropezones y choques / pues siempre o casi o casi está el refugio / de utopiazantes pero posibles futurosWhat Testimony of Circumstances represents then is a kind of pseudo-biography, a fascinating, disarming, and brilliant cross section of a life dedicated to literature. Everything is on display here – Lira’s politics, his contentious rivalries with those he wanted to regard as friends and/or peers, his utterly merciless inner voice – all of it. There is a richness of perspective present that caught me rather off guard. Some poems feel like they were written by entirely different people. “Es Ti Pi” is methodical and deliberate, laid out like mantras that are meant to wrestle a maelstrom under control, while “Tres Cientos Sesenta y Cincos y un 366 de Onces” is verbose and unchecked, rolling with gravitas and an almost palpable need to expel its words. Still other poems, like “El Superpoeta Zurita”, move back and forth between those styles, as if the speaker cannot make up his mind about his reaction to the subject, at once flattering and annoyed, caught up in awe and obsessing over blemishes. It gives an unnerving and empowering impression that Lira is trying on a multitude of essences before ultimately refusing to adopt any but his own.
construct and shape the trademark / registered brand, graphic territory – and at once, the logo – / of a certain motor oil, lubricating substance / which is said to have had – at least at one / time had – (1) psychedelic or psychotomimetic powers.The structures of the poems are the truest manifestation of Lira’s quest for identity. There is a stubborn refusal to allow the reader to settle into almost any kind of rhythm, which only makes sense when you realize that lyricism and cadence are not primary concerns. We are pushed and pulled because Lira is ultimately trying to convey what it is like in his mind, what it feels like to be him. Again, the layout and line breaks in “El Superpoeta Zurita” are so interesting that it felt like Lira was asking me if I understood what he was saying and, when I answered yes, he told me I was wrong and rearranged. His identity and essence are pulled in a dozen different directions, all of which he holds onto lest they pull him apart and leave the unique perspective shattered. I found this particularly surprising given my reading about Lira and how important stage performance was to his career. This is the kind of poetry that would make most open mic night bards turn green. And yet, it makes its own kind of sense in hindsight. Lira refuses to be bound and defined in simplicity. He is not merely written or spoken word.
he aquí las mias / Quisiera poder mostrar algo / de diertas cancioraciones sinfeccionadas, sinfectadas / de ciertas esperrancias y herideas sincereceas / –sincavidades o con carieacontecidas concavidadesI have never quite been sure what the technical definition of conversational poetry is, but I would hazard a guess that poems in Testimony would be prime examples. That refusal of lyricism allows Lira’s diction to feel like he is there, speaking to you; not as a spirit or a god delivering edicts and making demands, but as a person trying desperately to explain their world view and hoping someone will listen. This manner of writing helps the reader deal with the stop and go momentum of the structure, but it also helps you keep up with Lira’s changes of perspective and thought process. It makes what seems like an initially daunting task actually intimately relatable. And speaking of daunting tasks, Rodrigo Olavarria and Thomas Rothe deserve all the credit in the world for capturing Lira’s essence on the page and through translation. Their work is the kind of accuracy you crave as a reader of poetry, accurate to both letter and spirit, with the flexibility to appreciate and utilize the cultural and linguistic divides to enhance the experience.
So what it comes down to is we should die simple deaths / without widespread panic or panspread widnic or wad spread pinic / gently, our traps shutI mentioned earlier the capacity of literature to wound, particularly when you approach it from an angle that includes a combination philosophy, emotion, and the work’s ability to make you feel. In truth, I was not expecting Testimony to have such an effect. In the interest of complete honesty, as I read about Lira, I was rather concerned that I had agreed to read the ravings of that one poet in any random literary circle who acts like his decent reception at a few open mic nights means more than the work of published poets but who still desperately wants to get published himself. And now, I sit here, writing this, more than a little ashamed in the arrogance of that misplaced concern. Rodrigo Lira’s poetry is fantastic. Rodrigo Lira took his own life on his thirty second birthday. Rodrigo Lira’s written words have come further than almost any text I have ever read to bridging the gap between souls and allowing me to see into the mind of someone else. He deserved and deserves better, especially from me. I approach my own thirty second birthday and have struggled with mental health issues since I was a teenager. Lira’s work serves as a critical reminder that no perspective deserves to be treated with disrespect without merit, and that, in this age where people are finally beginning to wake up on a large scale from the illusion of binaries, that conformity and rebellion are two poorly defined points on a spectrum that is ever in motion. - John Venegas
http://angelcityreview.com/testimony-of-circumstances/
Rodrigo Lira was born in Santiago, in 1949. He studied philosophy, psychology, arts, communication arts, linguistics, and philology, among other things, but he never graduated. An eccentric fellow, he never published a book while he was alive. His poems, though, were spread by hand, around different university campuses, where he used to hang out with other poets and friends. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Rodrigo committed suicide in 1981, on the day of his thirty-second birthday. Conisdered a cult figure, his fame most of the time prevents a serious assessment of the real importance of his work.
In 2010, the young translators Rodrigo Olavarría and Thomas Rothe received a grant from Chile’s Ministry of Culture to translate the poetry of Rodrigo Lira into English. The project, which includes over twenty poems of various lengths, is in its final stages of revision and currently seeking a US publishing house to print a bilingual edition. Thomas Rothe (Berkeley, California, 1985), who’s been living in Chile for almost ten years, generously accepted to respond to three questions about Lira’s work and biography, as well as the translation process. He holds an MA in Latin American and Chilean Literature from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile. He has translated poetry into both English and Spanish, including an anthology of contemporary US poets, La alteración del silencio (Cuneta, 2011), in collaboration with Galo Ghigliotto.
Can you describe briefly the myth of Rodrigo Lira? What’s the importance of his poetry? And what’s his place in Chilean literature?
Rodrigo Lira’s suicide on December 26, 1981, fostered much of the myth surrounding him as a poète maudit. And in fact his life reveals the reasons this label attached to him — a diagnosis of schizophrenia, social and literary marginality, as well as a taste for marijuana, more reminiscent of Beat poets than his Chilean contemporaries in the 1970s and early 80s. Having never published a book of poems while alive not only adds to the aura of a misunderstood poet, but also provides few records of critical attention with which to reconstruct the story of his life, a task that has been pursued mainly by gathering the personal accounts of friends, family, and fellow writers. These circumstances have also blurred the lines between myth and reality, which seems to have been Lira’s literary proposition.
Looking over the unclassifiable work Lira left behind, one thing becomes clear: his desire to enter the pantheon of Chilean literature was overcome by a desire to deface its engravings and cause laughter in doing so. And laughter introduced a new face into the somber drama so characteristic of national poetry up until the 1970s. Whereas many of Lira’s poems may resemble Nicanor Parra’s antipoetry or traces of the Chilean neo-avant-garde movement (Raúl Zurita, Juan Luis Martínez, Diamela Eltit, among others), Lira took parody and literary collages to such an extreme he often found no point of return or closure, marking a fine line between admiration and aversion for other, more established writers. He explored the limits and intensity of language in a way that also reflects and responds to the context of widespread censorship imposed by Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. Maybe that’s why Enrique Lihn, who himself maintained a somewhat turbulent friendship with Lira, considered his poetry unsettling, meant to keep us awake instead of dreaming.
Three years after Lira’s death, a group of friends compiled his manuscripts into what became his first book, Project of a Complete Works (Proyecto de obras completas), which has gone through several reprintings by different publishing houses. And in 2006, previously unpublished texts appeared in Sworn Declaration (Declaración jurada), expanding the interest in his work as well as the myth behind — or in front of — the poet. I would say that today, the enigmatic character Lira cultivated during a time of extreme silence and confusion continues to evoke ambiguity, intrigue, and laughter, though his name no longer occupies a marginal place in Chilean literature. I would also venture to say that the work of poets such as Lihn, Parra, Zurita, and Diego Maquieira, and certainly that of younger generations, cannot be fully understood without the presence of Lira’s persona and poetry.
Lira’s poetry is extremely colloquial and informal. Irony and intertextuality were important devices in his work. What challenges did you face when translating his poems?
One of the most striking traits of Lira’s writing is how much it draws from local references, whether urban markers in Santiago, the work of other writers and critics, or language. Chile’s unique geography as a long stretch of country locked between mountain range and sea has had a major influence in distinguishing the Chilean accent and dialect from other Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. On top of that, Lira was born into an upper middle-class family, spent most of his life in Santiago, and belonged to the university scene, constantly interacting with young people, allowing him access to the argot of these geographic and sociocultural groups. And he exhausts that language, proving himself a master of local slang. This clearly posed a challenge for bringing many of his texts into English, and we had to accept the impossibility of “faithfully” translating many sections, which actually serves as a useful lesson for any translation. For the most part, words and phrases that refer to specific things often have to become more generalized and therefore lose part of their meaning, but at the same time broaden the interpretations. An example of this can be found in a poem where Lira describes festivities taking place during the “semana premechona,” literally the welcome week for first-year students at the University of Chile. To avoid obstructing the rhythm of the poem and tedious explanations, we thought it best that the setting simply be a freshmen week, allowing the reader to imagine such activities and celebrations at any university, whether they actually share similarities or not. Another example is in the title of the poem “4 tres cientos sesenta y cincos y un 366 de onces,” where, as you know, the last word in italics refers to the number eleven and also a traditional Chilean evening meal. In the English version we lose the double meaning, opting to express the importance of the number, which we believe refers to a specific date — September 11, 1973, the day of the military coup that ousted Salvador Allende. This sort of wordplay constantly appears throughout Lira’s poetry, and our renderings were made on a case-by-case basis but often accept the loss of certain nuances so present in the originals.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that we whitewashed these poems. Some are very dense, and we have intentionally kept them that way in their English versions. One of the most difficult tasks of translating poetry is not to fall back on the strategy of standardizing the language, making it overly readable or only concentrating on transmitting some sort of message from the poem. With that in mind, we have attempted to render these texts as accessible as possible to a broad readership while maintaining the intensity of language Lira developed as a trademark.
Other challenges included translating neologisms and rhymes, which in many cases we overcame with the help of dictionaries and thesauruses. One particular poem which merited almost constant dictionary referral was “Es Ti Pi,” or “Ess Tee Pee,” in English. The poem, often deemed “untranslatable,” consists of some five pages where each verse includes three words beginning with the letters S, T, and P, in that order. Attempting to follow the content of this brilliantly disturbing poem, English syntax clearly made it impossible to reproduce the narrative techniques used in the text. Again, this meant accepting the loss of nuances but, more than ever in this case, recreating a text in which Lira’s pen brings new possibilities to the English language.
Why do you think it is necessary to have his poetry available in English? What do you think the English-speaking reader will find in his work?
The most obvious objective is to extend the reach of this poetry beyond the linguistic borders of Spanish. Read in its historical and political context, Lira’s work expresses a response to the suffocating environment of the 70s and 80s in Chile, offering stories, sensations, and atmospheres that history books are unable to capture. We hope this poetry will help English speakers understand the complexity of recent Chilean history and, in general, that of the Southern Cone, where several other countries simultaneously experienced right-wing dictatorships. From a strictly literary perspective, Lira’s parodies of internationally recognized Chilean poets (Neruda, Mistral, De Rokha, Huidobro, and Parra) could complement perceptions of their work and its impact among Chilean writers of younger generations. Even Roberto Bolaño, who has experienced a boom among English-speaking readers over the last decade, wrote several pieces in praise of Lira, suggesting he could possibly be the last poet of Chile or Latin America — this is a very Bolañoesque exaggeration but displays his profound respect and admiration.
On the other hand, from a less utilitarian approach, the very process of translating Lira’s poetry into a different language and cultural context implies introducing new poetic forms into that language. This doesn’t mean Lira’s poetry will change the English language, but rather that the poetry assumes a new meaning capable of becoming a reference, miniscule as it may be, for poetry and literature written in English. Walter Benjamin believed translation allowed the original work to move into an afterlife, a different stage of existence with new possibilities. At the core of this idea, Benjamin is criticizing attempts to “faithfully” reproduce works of literature in different languages, defending the need for translation to change and renew the original. I like to think our renderings of Lira’s poetry head in this direction. I also tend to think Lira would have found it amusing to hear someone associate the idea of afterlife with his poetry, which he may have wanted to translate himself if he were still alive. Lira spoke English quite fluently and even wrote an untitled poem in English, which has not been included in any of his posthumous publications. It begins with these lines:
Being chased
as a hunting dog
as a hunting dog
persecuted by distant laughs
and cruel horns
I’m fixing a gravewhere the blood gets inand cruel horns
ARS POÉTIQUE
for the imaginary gallery
Let verse be like a picklock
To break in and steal
The dictionary at night
With a flashlight whose beam is
deaf as an
Adobe wall
Wailing Wall
Licked
Hearing Walls!
a Rocket falls a Mirage flies by
the windows tremble
This is the century of neurosis and acronyms
and acronyms
it’s the nerves, the nerves
True vigor resides in the pockets
it’s the checkbook
Muscles are sold in packages through the Mail
ambition lingers
poetry doesn’t rest
it’s h
an
g
i
ng
in head offices at the Library Archives and Museums in luxury ass
ets of basic necessity,
oh, poets! Sing not
to the roses, oh, let them ripen and cook
rose bud jelly in the poem
____________________________________________________________________
The Author apoloJizes for having caused the Reader any trouble (Ur Spare Change = My Paychec)
- CARLOS SOTO-ROMÁN http://jacket2.org/commentary/rodrigo-lira
Rodrigo Lira was born in Santiago in 1949. He gained notoriety during the seventies for his dramatic public readings and eccentric parodies of many established Chilean poets. Tormented by a diagnosis of schizophrenia as well as social marginalization, he committed suicide in 1981, on his thirty-second birthday. After his death and the posthumous publication of his first collection of poems, Proyecto de obras completas, interest in Lira’s poetry and life grew exponentially into a cult following that has influenced many younger generations of Chilean poets and writers. Combining erudite literary knowledge, intense language, and dark burlesque humor, Lira’s work is often compared to contemporaries Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. Roberto Bolaño described him as “one of the last poets of Latin America.”
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