Néstor Osvaldo Perlongher, Cadavers, Trans. by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman. Cardboard House Press, 2018.
"In CADAVERS, his long poem on the desaparecidos--the disappeared victims of Argentina's military dictatorship--Perlongher does not seek to return their presence or whereabouts to those unnamed, absent corpses, but to restore their corporeity to them. He does so by means of a poetic language that can be as coarse and funny as it is ornate, bringing together such disparate elements as Góngora's Baroque and the neighborhood hair salon, Rubén Darío's Modernismo and Argentine public elementary schools.
"Legend has it that Perlongher wrote his poem on the interminable bus trip from Buenos Aires to São Paulo that would take him into exile from a regime that had paradoxically criminalized him not for his fierce political activism, but for his militant homosexuality. This gorgeous translation by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman retraces Perlongher's journey, and finally brings his great poem to an English-speaking audience."- Ezequiel Zaidenwerg
"Legend has it that Perlongher wrote his poem on the interminable bus trip from Buenos Aires to São Paulo that would take him into exile from a regime that had paradoxically criminalized him not for his fierce political activism, but for his militant homosexuality. This gorgeous translation by Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman retraces Perlongher's journey, and finally brings his great poem to an English-speaking audience."- Ezequiel Zaidenwerg
“In the nets of fishermenIn the tumbling of crayfishIn she whose hair is nippedby a small loose hairclipThere Are cadavers.”
0. Cadavers is the best-known poem by Argentinian Néstor Perlongher and it is one of the representative works of a Latin American postmodern poetry movement dubbed neobarroco, Neo-Baroque. José Kozer, a Cuban poet, describes neobarroco as: “The second line [of Latin American poetry; the first one is a thin, familiar line], meaning the thick line, I associate with international poetry, a stronger convergance and diversity, indeed more opaque, but, in spite of its thickness, more encompassing. This international poetry includes aspects of twentieth Century [North] American poetry, as well as a basic source rooted in the Spanish Golden Age Baroque, Góngora, and Quevedo above all.” Poetry that is written with a thick line demands texts about it to be thick-lined as well. The following text is my attempt at complicating the all-too-familiar form of the book review. There Are Cadavers.1. There Are Cadavers. This is the somber fact insisted throughout the poem, at the end of almost every stanza. It is its pulse, the beating of a death drum. If the poem were even longer, it would repeat it as many as thirty thousand times: the estimated number of desaparecidos during Argentina’s military junta regime during the seventies. And even longer, but darker all the same, if it were to include the victims of the Mexican Drug War, the Somoza and Pinochet Dictatorships, and many other CIA-sponsored tragedies throughout Latin America. There Are Cadavers.
2. No place is safe enough, no circumstance untainted, no person untouched. Violence has become the measure of the Latin American reality, perhaps the defining event. Latin American memory moves from one bullet wound to another, weaving a dense web of hauntings. This circumstance of violence-as-form has intensified in the first decades of the new millennium—all ten of the deadliest cities in the world are in the region. Néstor Perlongher’s poem bears witness to this tragic number, and has the fanged form of violence itself. “Under the brush / In the scrub / Upon the bridges / In the canals,” “When the horse steps over / muddy polders,” “Yes in the camphor box on the chest of that / pretty teacher.” There Are Cadavers.
3. The poem’s exuberant anxiety and nervous surfaces—a brand of neobarroco (Neo-Baroque) Perlongher called neobarroso, which fused the baroque with the mud, barro, of La Plata River—is not merely for aesthetic effect or derived from some finely wrought abstraction, as other avant-gardes would have it. It is political, rooted in real state oppression against subversive bodies. The poem thrusts its language fiercely against the death-operations of the military junta. Perlongher is precise in his attacks, and the proliferation of cadavers in his poem is also the proliferation of his radical critique. It is with this barro that Perlongher gives presence again to the Argentinian desaparecidos, the disappeared, the unrecovered.
4. Cadavers is the raunchiest daughter of Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, which I consider the first neobarroco book of poems, or at least the first neobarroco poems are to be found there, and not in the Cuban José Lezama Lima’s work, which is generally considered to be the first example of the style. You can hear throughout the poem amplified spades of Lorca’s “Cry Toward Rome (From the tower of the Chrysler Building)” and “New York (Office and Denunciation).” There Are Cadavers.
5. Néstor Perlongher himself was a subversive body. Being one of the founders of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual, the Homosexual Liberation Front, brought him under government persecution. His sexual identity did even more than his political activism. Perlongher was detained and processed in 1976. In 1981 he took a night bus to Brazil, never to return to Argentina. Legend has it that he wrote “Cadavers” during that bus trip. The poem itself is a long bus ride into the Latin American nightmare birthed in 1521. There Are Cadavers.
6. Néstor Perlongher died of AIDS-related complications in 1992. He wrote six books of poetry. “Cadavers” originally belongs to Alambres (Wires), his second book published in 1987. To publish this long poem as a bilingual chapbook was a bold decision; it gives it a renewed intensity. I dare say the ideal way of publishing and reading “Cadavers” today is in an uncluttered, slim format you would easily read during a bus ride. There Are Cadavers.
7. To translate such a poem into our uncertainty-riddled twenty-first century is activism. Every language has its cadavers, and it must come to terms with it—be it through art, politics or any other medium. Roberto Echavarren and Donald Wellman have successfully managed to translate into American English not only the words, but the absences inscribed in the disheveled Rioplatense Spanish of Perlongher. The impish tones that swerve from denunciation to joke, and from the obscure to the erotic, is almost entirely preserved. The translators have come up with skillful solutions to difficult passages such as translating “laz zarigüeyaz de dezhechoz,” as “the possumz in ze garbage.” Even for the non-Argentinian Spanish speaker there are a number of words that are unfamiliar, especially those coming from gaucho or tango contexts: colimba, cachafaz, catinga, fiólos. Maybe this flavor is somewhat lost when those words become regular English: “who’s been drafted,” rascal, stink, pimp, respectively. Hay Cadáveres. There Are Cadavers.
8. In September 2010 I took a three-day seminar called “The Poetics of Death.” Roberto Echavarren taught it. It was during this seminar that my twenty-something me discovered Medusario, the game-changing Latin American poetry anthology edited by Jacobo Sefamí, José Kozer, and Echavarren himself. The collection has two prologues: the first one by Echavarren and the second one by none other than Néstor Perlongher. Other anthologized names include José Lezama Lima, Raúl Zurita, Marosa di Giorgio, Roberto Hinostroza, and Coral Bracho. If someone is intimately acquainted with Perlogher’s poetry, it is Echavarren. There Are Cadavers.
9. The ominously-titled seminar took place in Monterrey, a city in northern Mexico, at the height of the drug cartel violence. Two grad students from my university had died in crossfire six months before. That night I was at a party blocks away from the shooting—we all heard the shots. Ten months later Los Zetas—the notorious criminal syndicate—would set fire to a casino, killing fifty-two people. That day I saw the pall of smoke from my apartment. When I read “Cadavers,” its opening line were seared into my mind. I knew what it meant, unfortunately. They were everywhere: on every TV channel, in every lunch conversation. I saw one myself lying on the street one hot summer night. There Are Cadavers.
10. The neobarrocos are unsurprisingly not well known outside Latin America—dissemination of radical poetics is often subject to political limitations. However, recent translations of Kozer, Di Giorgio, and Lezama Lima, and a growing number of scholarly works suggest an increasing interest in the English-speaking world. I would hope this valuable addition will be a prelude to a larger Perlongher translation project. Our dire climate begs for it. There Are Cadavers.
11. In online book reviews
In the posting and the sharing and the liking
Behind every screen and under every keyboard
There Are Cadavers. - Sergio Sarano
The energy in Perlongher’s poetry seems to move between two polar concepts: the flow of writing (or drift, or wandering) and the care of revision and rejection. This is problematised by Perlongher’s attitude to the individual, an attitude perpetually informed by the possibility that “no hay un ‘yo’” (Perlongher 1997b:20).” - Ben Bollig
“Throughout his work Perlongher seeks a fluid, non-binary persona in drift, in an incessant process of becoming, very much in line with Deleuze’s theories. Perlongher moves on the margins outside of the norm, be it the literary norm or the patriarchal societal and political stratification of his time. When homosexuality ceases to be a deviant marginality and is co-opted by society, with desire controlled by permissible behaviours (in light of the AIDS epidemic), Perlongher turns increasingly to a nomadic voice in constant flux and ultimately to the abandonment of the individual self into a larger, mystical unity.” - Marlene Gottlieb
In Argentina during the 1970s, homosexuality was outlawed. The imprisonment, torture, blackmail and disappearance of gays and other moral “subversives” and “degenerates” was common practice normalized and enforced by the junta government’s Ministry of Morality. This wonky translation for the name of the federal police force’s Departamento de Moralidad is intentional—only in the Land of Oz or Ursula Le Guin is such an agency nameable without resorting to irony. When gay rights activist Néstor Perlongher was imprisoned in 1975 at the age of 26 for possession of narcotics he probably assumed he would be dead within a week, but not before undergoing a routine of “enhanced” interrogation techniques like getting a couple of fingers chopped off. Although Perlongher had been jailed many times before—either for cruising or just for looking like a maricón—this detainment, following a raid of his home, promised to be exceptionally brutal. Unlike many of his fellow degenerates, Perlongher survived this three-month imprisonment and began writing the poems that would be collected in Austria-Hungaria, his first book. Shortly after the book’s release in 1980, Perlongher was detained again and beaten severely. He left Argentina soon thereafter and pursued an advanced degree in urban anthropology at the University of Campinas, in São Paulo, Brasil. In 1987, Editorial Último Reino published Alambres (Wires), the source of the two poems translated here. Néstor Perlongher died of AIDS in 1992.– Steve Dolph
Freud once said, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” He was right about us of course, don’t mind me being bold in saying so, boldness another solid poet trait. When Steve Dolph first told me that the late Argentine poet Néstor Perlongher had become an anthropologist, my first thought was, “Well, that’s a bit redundant, but a terrific occupation for a poet!” I’m grateful to Steve for introducing me to Perlongher’s extraordinary poems, and for inviting me to assist him with some English translations. It’s no mistake Steve would choose me, since he was aware of my often queer-centered poetry, but not just queer, and not queer in the mainstream, bourgeois fashion, but a queerness from the streets: poverty, prostitution, drag queens, suicide, drugs, AIDS, and more poverty. It’s been a privilege to join with Steve in shaping Néstor Perlongher’s poems into English, tapping into the great voice of a poet now dead of AIDS, like many lovely voices I’ve known, and very much miss. I look forward to listening closely to Perlongher with Steve in the days to come as we continue to translate and shape these poems which are long overdue their translation into English, and long overdue their additional audience for new generations to come. If you don’t know the work of Néstor Perlongher, you should, in fact everyone should. – CA Conrad
‘How can we be so lovely’
Freud once said, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.” He was right about us of course, don’t mind me being bold in saying so, boldness another solid poet trait. When Steve Dolph first told me that the late Argentine poet Néstor Perlongher had become an anthropologist, my first thought was, “Well, that’s a bit redundant, but a terrific occupation for a poet!” I’m grateful to Steve for introducing me to Perlongher’s extraordinary poems, and for inviting me to assist him with some English translations. It’s no mistake Steve would choose me, since he was aware of my often queer-centered poetry, but not just queer, and not queer in the mainstream, bourgeois fashion, but a queerness from the streets: poverty, prostitution, drag queens, suicide, drugs, AIDS, and more poverty. It’s been a privilege to join with Steve in shaping Néstor Perlongher’s poems into English, tapping into the great voice of a poet now dead of AIDS, like many lovely voices I’ve known, and very much miss. I look forward to listening closely to Perlongher with Steve in the days to come as we continue to translate and shape these poems which are long overdue their translation into English, and long overdue their additional audience for new generations to come. If you don’t know the work of Néstor Perlongher, you should, in fact everyone should. – CA Conrad
‘How can we be so lovely’
“Perlongher’s work is full of fences, borders, edges crumbling or about to fall, in an orgy of words that slip, tear, handkerchiefs that unravel.” - Jose Quiroga
Néstor Perlongher, Three Poems - Asymptote Journal
Néstor Osvaldo Perlongher, Plebeian Prose, Polity, 2019.
Plebeian Prose is a key work by the pioneering Argentinian-Brazilian anthropologist, sociologist and poet, Néstor Perlongher. Perlongher represents an original critical “queer” voice in Latin American thought, whose work has been highly influential in the development of Latin American cultural theory and literature.
This book is an exploration of the politics of desire, questions of identity, Latin American neobaroque aesthetics, sexual dissidence, violence and jouissance. Prompted by his reading of Gilles Deleuze, the link between politics and desire remains central to all of Perlongher’s reflections and gives his writings a lasting topicality. A thinker of the streets with a keen interest in those on the margins of society, the ideas that Perlongher develops in this book offer a lucid critique of capitalism and institutional power. His approach also reflects a particular Latin-American neobaroque style, a mode of critique whose value endures today.
Providing insight into Latin American culture and politics of the late 20th century, Plebeian Prose will be of particular interest to anyone working on critical theory, literary theory, anthropology, sociology and gender studies.
This book is an exploration of the politics of desire, questions of identity, Latin American neobaroque aesthetics, sexual dissidence, violence and jouissance. Prompted by his reading of Gilles Deleuze, the link between politics and desire remains central to all of Perlongher’s reflections and gives his writings a lasting topicality. A thinker of the streets with a keen interest in those on the margins of society, the ideas that Perlongher develops in this book offer a lucid critique of capitalism and institutional power. His approach also reflects a particular Latin-American neobaroque style, a mode of critique whose value endures today.
Providing insight into Latin American culture and politics of the late 20th century, Plebeian Prose will be of particular interest to anyone working on critical theory, literary theory, anthropology, sociology and gender studies.
Ben Bollig: ‘Néstor Perlongher: The Poetic Search for an Argentine Marginal Voice’The XUL Reader: An Anthology of Argentine Poetry (1980-1996)
Néstor Perlongher was an Argentine poet and gay rights activist. Born in Avellaneda, Buenos Aires Province, on Christmas night in 1949, he was a founder and key member of the Frente de Liberación Homosexual (Homosexual Liberation Front), one of the first LGBT organizations in the world. From 1982, he lived in São Paulo, where he earned a master's degree in Social Anthropology, and taught as a professor at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). He received the Boris Vian prize in 1987 for his book Alambres, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. His poetic work comprises six books, beginning with Austria-Hungría in 1980. He was a frequent contributor to various Argentine magazines, and in 1991 compiled the bilingual Spanish- Portuguese anthology Caribe transplatino, poesía neobarroca cubana y rioplatense. One of his best-known essays is La prostitución masculina (Male Prostitution). He died in São Paulo in 1992
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