Mario Montalbetti - His texts are a constant invitation to leave language behind & discover there is nothing to replace it. What takes the place of that vacuum? Basically lessons on life we call poetry. But he is not so sure.

Mario Montalbetti, Language Is a Revolver For Two, Trans. by Clare Sullivan, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018.

Language Is a Revolver for Two revolves around the premise that within an economy of supply and demand (such as language) the supply never affects love. Thus, coins and tramways, imaginary Inca poets, and black olives are examined in order to intervene in such a framework and, ultimately, to find something outside of it.


one thing and one thing only affects love: the demand for love.
supply doesn’t affect love


His texts are a constant invitation to leave language behind & discover there is nothing to replace it. What takes the place of that vacuum? Basically lessons on life we call poetry. But he is not so sure. Mario Montalbetti is the foremost maître à penser in recent Latin American poetry, and his proposal about poetry as a form of knowledge is becoming increasingly popular worldwide.—Mirko Lauer

The true Mario of Peruvian letters—Mario Montalbetti is an indispensable poet and thinker of our time. English-speaking readers: you´re in for a roller-coaster treat. Profound and witty, contemporary to the core, Montalbetti´s poetry and essays relentlessly investigate what is happening to language in the here and now of our fears and dilemmas, our joys, our very own darkness. The poem is always more important than the poet, claims this linguist and professor. The poet should be erased by the poem. Before that happens, or as it happens, read Clare Sullivan's pristine translation of these selected poems, hopefully the first of many to come. —Cristina Rivera Garza

Peruvian born poet and linguistics professor Mario Montalbetti’s latest collection of poetry Language Is a Revolver for Two showcases his incredible ability to use poetry to rhythmically unfold a prophecy to his reader. Throughout these fourteen poems, Montalbetti consistently uses the motif of movement, particularly its risings and fallings, as a way of tracking his exploration of language’s, and by extension, the world’s economy of supply and demand. Essentially delineating the reason that law cannot be fully applied to love: “one thing and only one thing affects love: / the demand for love. / … supply doesn’t affect love.”
The collection unfolds beginning with the first poem, “As I Conceive It We Are Climates,” which is set against the void-like landscape of a man in Lisbon looking out at a river: “He doesn’t write, doesn’t drink, doesn’t think / about the things he sees or the sounds he hears.” From the onset, water is used as a key symbol, along with fish and salt. The fish often speak to this coldness and this sense of violence, acting as an omen for man’s inescapable mortality even though “language is faster / than the world.”
In the poem which harbors the collection’s namesake, Montalbetti begins by establishing the manner in which other species use language to combat each other: “cow—cawing / goose squawking,” etc. By the end, he sets man and woman against one another, but not without highlighting their common condition of humanity: “man, wo / man—speaking, speak / ing, until the heart / is pulp / silencing—a bonze on fire.” Montalbetti likens the act of man and woman successively silencing each other to a sacrificial act by a monk. Man cannot express his love without the use of language, which is destructive by its very nature. Hence, one cannot love without acknowledging this greater, cosmic sacrifice.
As the reader moves towards the collection’s close, the motif of movement accordingly shifts more heavily to the evocation of descent, gravity, and the sensation of falling. A personal favorite of mine is the poem “Magnifichant,” in which Montalbetti follows a night of lovemaking by a sunrise whose color he describes as “that dawn orange / as a ripe papaya / falls from the sky / and shatters upon the pavement.”
Montalbetti ends the collection fittingly with a poem titled, “Goal and Object of a Poem,” noting the paradox of poetry’s central objective: “trying to express a private sentiment / in public language.” The necessity for total intimacy is what governs all the greatest poetry, examining their subject until it’s “Smashed to bits against a dark hillside / that wasn’t in the charts” with nothing left but “the wreckage.” It’s as if Montalbetti is daring his reader to seek permanence in poetry’s aftermath, to maintain remembrance in spite of the difficulty. In this sense, every reader’s experience of his poetry will differ depending on his or her willingness to dare, dream, and seek possibilities where there may be none. - Juliana Clark
http://columbiajournal.org/review-language-is-a-revolver-for-two-by-mario-montalbetti/


Mario Montalbetti's Language Is a Revolver for Two reviewed on Tupelo Quarterly
Mario Montalbetti's Language Is a Revolver for Two reviewed in The Arkansas International
Language Is a Revolver for Two included on Words Without Borders' Our Favorite International Reads from 2018



An Economics Lesson

Why aren’t the markets affected
by the grand desertions, by love affairs that end,
by twilights and disappointments?

No one knows. A few people know:
because the markets respond to two things
and two things only: capital inflows
and expected earnings.

He said this to himself as he walked
with hurried steps, preparing class
on the way to class. He crossed the street.

The lottery man was standing
on the corner, tickets stuck
to his flannel shirt with a safety pin.

He imagined roosters. He kept walking.

He asked himself rhetorically:
and what affects love? The class continues.

No one knows. A few people know:
one thing and one thing only affects love:
the demand for love.

(This is the surprising law
that he must convince them of:


supply doesn’t affect love.)




Magnifichant

After doing a job that is remunerated, immune
almost municipal, taking care that my son
doesn’t stumble, and making nocturnal love,

I extinguish the megawatts
and drink alcohol til lubricated
(moonshine, muni, near connubial)

later between the slats of the shutters I can see

that dawn orange as a ripe papaya
falls from the sky
and shatters upon the pavement.
http://www.washingtonsquarereview.com/mario-montalbetti/








A couple of years ago, Mario Montalbetti offered a poetry reading in Buenos Aires, at the La 

Internacional Argentina bookstore, managed by Francisco Garamona and Nicolás Moguilevsky, the headquarters of the mythical Editorial Mansalva. They presented Montalbetti that evening, and Gerardo Jorge accepted the mission of saying a few words before the guest opened his selection of poems; the Peruvian poet’s gray hair and glasses didn’t presage the currentness of his proposal, his corrosive irony and his way of problematizing language. For many attendees, that evening was like a glass of cold beer; the freshness of that scene remains intact in the anthology Huir no es mejor plan [Running away is not the best plan].
Gerardo Jorge’s selection of Mario Montalbetti’s work consists of a survey of eight books, which go from 1978’s Perro Negro: 31 poemas [Black dog: 31 poems] to 2016’s Simio meditando (ante una lata oxidada de aceite de oliva) [Ape meditating (in front of a rusty can of olive oil)]. Along with this sample, and as an epilogue, is an interview between the two—the selected and the selector—in which nothing is wasted: like Humboldt’s penguins, the poet migrates across the entire Latin American tradition to give a panoramic vision of the currents and coastlines on which his proposal is based.
That said, it’s possible that this burst of publications of his books throughout the continent and even in Spain comes at a moment when poetry is passing through a state that is, if not critical, at least singular. Seemingly, the emergence of new technologies and the editorial boom of certain phenomena that seethe around us take for granted that the tone of poetry should be entirely lyrical and separated from its time and place of enunciation. Poetry, in such cases, is empty of any problematic emerging from its field of action, on the level of confronting the discourses that define what is real and what isn’t: they create an experience anchored to the past and a reader who knows what he’s looking for.
On his part, Montalbetti offers another angle, if not many, in which writing puts its possibilities under injunction, not without adopting that hint of black humor that characterized other precedents like Antonio Cisneros, Nicanor Parra, and Enrique Lihn. For example, his “Poema en Homenaje al V Congreso Nacional de Filosofía del Lenguaje, Huampaní 26-28 de junio del 2010” [Poem in homage to the Fifth National Conference of the Philosophy of Language, Huampani 26-28 June 2010] opens with the question: “¿cuál es la diferencia entre una vaca y el lenguaje?” [what’s the difference between a cow and language?]. Well, according to the poet, the cow:

Pace al lado del camino
El camino da un rodeo
Y lleva hasta el granero

La vaca cruza el camino

Sin rodeos

El lenguaje no puede hacer eso.

[Grazes beside the path
That path takes a detour
And reaches the barn

The cow crosses the path
Without detours

Language can’t do that.]

He seems to be saying that, in poetry, we must take nothing for granted, much less its materials: an affirmation that not only frames Montalbetti in that line, so well developed in the latter half of the twentieth century, that line of distrust that also allows him to search in different waters, of different consistencies and temperatures: the poem passes by the essay, it passes by discourse prepared for an unknown audience, and at the same time it establishes itself through logical mechanisms that allow for the scientific confirmation of any sentence. This pirouette, which is also the pirouette of irony, confers to the text the ability to disarticulate something that seems untouched these days: knowledge and, therefore, information.
Perhaps we ought to think of Mario Montalbetti as that student who’s always sitting in the back of the classroom asking uncomfortable questions, or who points out, in the midst of the professor’s enthusiasm, that there’s an error in his explanation. He also reminds us of that character from the novel Birthday by César Aira, who discovers, about to turn fifty, that an idea he has believed in his whole life about the phases of the moon was completely mistaken, until, at one moment, he confesses: “I see it all as an illusion, a simulacrum made of words.” And that’s where his poetics come into play, in the dismantling of an assemblage, which is the basis of his great 2012 book Apolo Cupisnique, perhaps the one that best condenses his work, with a poem like “Biografía” [Biography]:

Me busqué a mí mismo
Y me hallé a mí mismo
Y me hallé a mí mismo, sonso.

Elogié una sola cosa a cambio de todo
Y luego negué caminando bajo palmeras.

Llegué a la inevitable certidumbre de que el devenir
Me alcanzaba en olas serias.

Nada es. Tal vez el fuego es. Busqué leyes.

[I searched for myself
And I found myself
And I found myself, stupid.

I praised one thing in exchange for all else
And then I denied walking under palm trees.

I reached the inevitable certainty that changing time
Would reach me in serious waves.

Nothing is. Maybe fire is. I searched for laws.]

The end of this verse relates again to Aira’s character, who at one point confesses to not knowing anything, saying “I only know I don’t know everything. And I don’t even know that with conviction, I just find out by accident, by stumbling in.” This leads to that argument that Montalbetti’s poetry is often “cold,” “calculated.” This is true, in a sense, if we see in this project of trial and error a highly scientific element, with the poem as an experimental field. But, at the same time, yes and no, since these measurements and tests are registered by an I that doubts, that often possesses a heavy emotional weight and, above all, a voice that wraps it up in a feeling of estrangement, of being outside, of asking “why are there Peruvians instead of no Peruvians?” or, from his first books, pointing out empty houses, towns that appear out of nowhere, lonely places, “five minutes of horizon,” until he tells himself: “I am not from here.” As if the poet and the poem had another sense of belonging that is neither sedentary nor nomadic.
It’s possible that, at this point in the review, some readers would insist on my mentioning the influence of Montalbett’s work as a professor of linguistics in different American universities, and those readers wouldn’t be wrong. The poet says it himself in the interview from the epilogue:
“I’m still a linguist, and I teach linguistics at the university. And that ambiguous or mistaken relationship with language, from a double angle, has continued up to now. And I think it’s that formal, linguistic part that sometimes places me on the margin of what’s really happening in Peru.”
And it’s possible that this relation with the word is what defines the true place of this writing, that is, in the proceedings of speech, his rootedness in language; this has also allowed for the current reception of his writing in Latin America, creating, at every visit and reading, an audience curious to hear his mechanical instruments and his evasion maneuvers. The selection of Huir no es mejor plan works as a one-way ticket toward those areas, to those experiences of language that are “part deceit, part hope, part truth.” - Diego Alfaro (Translated by Arthur Dixon)http://www.latinamericanliteraturetoday.org/en/2018/november/huir-no-es-mejor-plan-mario-montalbetti


Mario Montalbetti (Lima, Peru, 1953) has a PhD in Linguistics from MIT. He has taught linguistics at Cornell, UCLA and The University of Arizona. Currently, he is Professor of Linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He has published 9 books of poems, the first one Perro Negro (Arybalo) in 1978, the last one Simio meditando (Mangos de hacha) in 2016. His poetry has been published in Mexico (by Aldus) and Spain (Liliputienses). Excerpts of his work have been published in Ecuador (Ruido Blanco) and Argentina (Mansalva). He has also published an essay on language and sense (Cajas, Fondo Editorial PUCP), a collection of essays on language and culture (Cualquier hombre es una isla, Fondo de Cultura Económica) and a study on a poem by Blanca Varela (El más crudo invierno, Fondo de Cultura Económica). He is a member of the Editing Committee of Hueso Húmero, a journal of arts and letters published in Lima, Perú.