Amanda Berenguer - In her poetry, desire is so grand and ubiquitous that it is like a giant in a solitary cosmos. Even a blackbird has a "heart with lightning bolts" and / "The apple is brilliant / and dangerous: / one alone can set an orchard on fire."

Amanda Berenguer, Materia Prima, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019. 

Materia Prima is the first English-language collection of Amanda Berenguer's poetry. A key contributor to Uruguay's famed literary Generación del 45, Berenguer (1921-2010) stands among the most important post-World War II poets of Latin America, along with her now-legendary compatriot Marosa di Giorgio. Berenguer’s poetry, stylistically and conceptually varied, ranges from classic, measured lyric to Dickinson-inspired gnomic utterance; from metaphysical and erotic rhetorical effusion to condensed and radically concrete experiment; from seemingly apolitical languor to pointed ideological dissent.
The poems included in this edition span a large portion of Berenguer's career and are taken from eight books, and an additional section dedicated to her visual poems.

This collection is edited by Kristin Dykstra and Kent Johnson, with translations by Gillian Brassil, Anna Deeny Morales, Mónica de la Torre, Kristin Dykstra, Kent Johnson, Urayoán Noel, Jeannine Marie Pitas, and Alex Verdolini.
The volume also includes an introduction by Roberto Echavarren and an interview conducted by Silvia Guerra. 

How fabulous to discover a major poet I knew nothing about! Is it that Uruguay is easily hidden behind the bigger Latin American countries, or that as a woman she is often disappeared behind the men? Amanda Berenguer, a major voice of the Uruguayan group of artists & thinkers known as the Generation of ’45, is finally getting her due in anglophone territory with the fine translations of this well-edited collection. Hers is urgent work, “wingenious” and “mythovulsive,” feisty yet lyrical, playful yet deeply serious, explorative yet assured. A great achievement.—Pierre Joris

We are lucky to get this anthology, which acquaints us extensively with Amanda Berenguer’s poetic cosmogony. It transports us to a planetarium where we float in ever-fluctuating cosmic landscapes. Berenguer’s constant "variants" of images, themes and graphics make me think of Emily Dickinson, while her vision has Blake’s vastness and exuberance. In her poetry, desire is so grand and ubiquitous that it is like a giant in a solitary cosmos. Even a blackbird has a "heart with lightning bolts" and / "The apple is brilliant / and dangerous: / one alone can set an orchard on fire." In "Of Cats and Birds" she writes, "When I meet a bird / I climb onto its wings without asking / and I fly among the heliotropes." I climb into Amanda Berenguer's pages and soar among cats, Möbius strips, quinces, blackbirds, The Magellanic Clouds.—Ewa Chrusciel

Across a long life Amanda Berenguer produced the most extraordinary poetry in a staggering variety of styles and forms. From complex longer poems like "Moebius Strip" to the exquisite grace of short poems fashioned with simple, richly evocative words, from concrete poems to such highly personal late masterpieces as "Leonardo Da Vinci and I" or "After Emily Dickinson," decade after decade Berenguer created highly original, unexpected poetry charged with surprise and intensity. Materia Prima is a beautifully balanced anthology that reveals the range and force of Berenguer's genius. An experimenter constantly finding new ways into the strangeness and exposed rawness of life, Berenguer's work goes on speaking in these powerful translations so carefully prepared by eight gifted translators. We owe them the greatest thanks.—Peter Boyle

Finally! A collection by the long overlooked “Amanda –from Montevideo–” in English. Materia Prima shows us the great range and depth of one of the quintessential voices of 20th century Spanish American poetry: from “light years of vertiginous / bliss” to “sea-sunset”, from “the scaly stomach / of the bottle” to “art with ass.” And the translations? These poems in their own right—showcasing some of the most talented translator-poets of our time—wash over us like an “intense wave of love.”   —Katherine M. Hedeen

from "Avec les gemissements graves du Montevideen", tr. Kristin Dykstra:

I’m Amanda – from Montevideo –
daughter of Amanda, cow-eyed
                        contemporary deity
                        blackbird heart with lightning bolts
where the flash that shatters night comes to roost
           it flaps joy inciting life
daughter of Rimmel, father
                        fighting cock
                        cruel Cerberus
                        or tender marrow under the feathers
                        almost bearings almost arrows
sister of Rimmel, sacrificed and dear
                        dead because the dead
                        from the kingdom of the dead
                        surrounded him


 

Materia Prima is the late Amanda Berenguer’s first English-language retrospective. It’s long overdue, as these things tend to be, especially since Berenguer was one of South America’s finest, and part of the influential Generation ’45, Uruguay’s reply to the region’s wider literary renaissance and an early stirring of what was known later as the Boom. Well-curated and featuring a cadre of excellent translators, Materia Prima pulls off what most ‘selected works’ rarely even bother to try. A poet’s lifelong evolution is made so clear it may as well have a route marker planted every mile.
Berenguer’s sixth book, and the first to get much notice outside of Latin America, Quehaceres e Invenciones, appeared in 1963. Over the next fifty years she would receive many of the most important literary awards at home and become a regular guest at poetry conferences throughout Europe, a point of pride for a nation like Uruguay whose impact on global culture was often slight. Long stretches in the United States also provided a modest presence in a country known to neglect—or at best Orientalize—Latin American writers: the Library of Congress even houses two tape reels of her live readings. During the 1980s she spoke at American colleges about state-terror in Uruguay, which back then was a military junta with a regular flow of foreign dollars that routinely kidnapped, locked up, tortured, and killed dissenters, violent or not. Sadly this could be said of the whole region, which was probably another reason to stay abroad.      
The US also left her with a taste for Emily Dickinson, whose poetry she brought back to Montevideo and eventually decided to translate, even though her English at the time was rudimentary. Throughout her life she would call Dickinson a sister and the discovery of her work a revelation. Despite reading her as early as the 1950s, any stylistic influence was somewhat discreet, although among her revolving set of idiosyncrasies was the oblique, or slash:

the light / dark / caught /
it bristles / a porcupine / furious /
and won’t let in the smooth /
elegant / oxygen /

Slashes appear in plenty of poems by left field or overscrupulous punctuators, but Berenguer’s are a nod to Emily Dickinson’s trademark em dash: e.g., “No notice—was—to me—” or “Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—.” Tradition usually treats it like a pregnant silence, an invitation to breathe, or even a rhythmic cue. These are all very American ways to read American poetry, where empty space will often conduct the reader’s voice, whereas Berenguer insists, in an interview appended to this volume, that for Dickinson the dash, instead of being a musical bar or a signal for quiet, is a type of movement:

[It’s] not a silence because the poem goes on [ . . . ] It’s as if she’d suddenly taken a little leap, arriving at a higher level. It’s something that ascends, each time making itself more complete, but never reaching completion [ . . . ] When I started using slashes, obliques, instead of dashes, I should have been using dashes.

Both are often clues to look closer than you would otherwise, provided the poet knows how to use them, of course. They’re hard to ignore, even if it isn’t obvious why. Disparate phrases seem to correspond and ordinary ones suddenly don’t, yet the writing is strong and no doubt doing something. Readers wonder whether they really know how words work after all, something Berenguer refers to as “moments where mystery is made.” Realizing this, she claims, was a kind of eureka moment, and she describes it with the relish of a Galileo discovering some fundamental physical law.     

That simile wasn’t idly chosen. Physics fascinated Berenguer throughout her life, as did topology and chemistry. The aforementioned interview, for example, is peppered with references to eighteenth-century chemist Antoine Lavoisier, as well as ultra-elaborate mathematical contraptions like the Klein Bottle and the Möbius strip. Compared to Jacques Roubaud, François Le Lionnais, or some other poet who actually had a day job as a mathematician, she looks more like an enthusiast than a true polymath, but this isn’t to say her work suffered as a result. If anything, the opposite is true. Many of those writers treat language itself as something calculable, a novel idea that gets old fast. Raymond Queneau’s poetry-producing algorithms (the most infamous could generate up to a hundred-thousand-billion sonnets) are brilliant and also totally pointless, better for literary lore than actual reading matter. Predicated on there being little potential left in the written word alone, such projects often have a hint of postmodern wryness, something noticeably absent in Berenguer. The sciences for her are more poetic than empirical, and a healthy respect for mystery makes up for a lack of formal qualifications:

A mystery is a secret. But they change according to the position you give them, don’t they? Like a molecular structure. That thing science has of mystery, in that for every change you make, the structure is transformed into something else. The total change of structure! Just based on the positioning! This reminds me of that other phrase I love and have repeated ever since I first heard it: ‘The table, that mad dance of electrons.’

Most striking about Berenguer’s poetry is its sheer constructedness, which is as flagrant as those exposed brick interiors with a grid of metal beams for a ceiling. Parallels could be drawn with paintings by Fernand Léger or Malevich: sharply-angled and architectonic, they make no bones about the artifice of the subject matter, nor that of the artist’s eye. Her language had developed a fabricated feel as early as 1966. Poems like “Unidentified Flying Object”—yes, it’s about a UFO—adopt a very “Atomic Era” vocabulary, colored by a somewhat morbid obsession with Sputnik’s presence in Earth’s lower orbit, the Roswell crash, and all things radioactive: e.g., “exposed to the infrared heat of the suburban dream” or “discus-like plate-shaped display” or “sparkling machine at 45 degrees” or “heat-resistant like love’s face.” This itself is hardly one of Berenguer’s major motifs, only a good example of her poetry’s materiality (excuse my lack of a better word).        
The “concrete” or visual poems of the 1970s go even further: Composición de lugar, a 1976 collection of which we get a sample, experimented with typography, handwriting, color, algebraic symbols, statistical graphs, and 3D space. Among her own body of work this is unique, but also when weighed with other efforts to make poetry pictorial, which has a long history as finger exercises for retired scholars or some avant-garde shtick to baffle the bourgeoisie. Side-by-side with Apollinaire’s modernist Calligrammes, or George Herbert’s staid devotional poems resembling episcopal altars and angel wings, or fellow South Americans like Brazil’s Noigandres poets (whose work drifted at times into pure design and qualified as writing only if defined loosely), Berenguer didn’t treat the form like play, nor the literary vanguard’s battering ram. Even the most cryptic poem of the lot, where multiples of the words wind, sand, and dune are configured to look like walls, feels like just another approach to a problem she had been patiently solving for years, which is true throughout Materia Prima. A narrative develops, a lifelike one where the subject grows more complex and layers build up over time, yet a few inherent qualities stay the same.
Credit is especially due to the team of editors and translators who, with this volume, provide a life in poetry with a clear arc, which is a hell of a thing to do, since lives like that are always a mess. Artistic development is seldom clear. Usually it doesn’t make sense even to the writer, let alone to whoever handles their papers once they’re dead. Every collection should shoot this high. - Garrett Phelps

https://www.asymptotejournal.com/criticism/materia-prima/

Amanda Berenguer's Materia Prima reviewed by John Bradley on Dispatches From the Poetry Wars

La Dama de Elche book cover, Madrid, 1987

Composed between 1983 and 1985, Amanda Berenguer’s celebrated collection La Dama de Elche (The Lady of Elche) showcases her mature writing.  Berenguer (1921-2010) resided in Uruguay, and the book is well known there.  Yet La Dama de Elche was first published in Madrid in 1987.
As a result, while Berenguer and her book are both associated with the Southern Cone, the publishing history of La Dama de Elche is transatlantic.  The translation of literatures amongst the Americas is not reducible to North/South axes.  It is true that N/S divides are relevant on many levels, not least because divisions are so often preserved, remade, and even heightened under contemporary forms of globalization.  Yet the translator often encounters one or more factors triangulating the geography of a project out of this hemisphere alone.  Transatlanticism, for example, introduces East/West axes of material and conceptual kind.
The publication of La dama de Elche in Spain came about because Berenguer entered her collection in a contest, the Premio Extraordinario de Poesía Iberoamericana, sponsored by the Fundación Banco Exterior.  The judges found her book excellent. 
Unfortunately the competition was structured to be anonymous.  Berenguer outed herself in the first line of her second poem:  “I’m Amanda – from Montevideo –“ (“soy Amanda –montevideana—“).[1]
Just in case anyone didn’t know who Amanda From Montevideo was, her second-to-last poem “day of rain” (“día de lluvia”)[2] ensured that they would collide with her surname.

what were you doing Ramón Berenguer, lord of Elche
                             son of James II of Aragon
                             in the year 1300 something
on a day of rain like today
among the date palms
that circle the city with minarets?

maybe you were pissing into the wind
                       -just like young Arthur Rimbaud-
your back to the feudal armies
with approval from the tallest palms?  (1-10)

          [. . .]                                                                                                        

I watch it rain in present tense
                                                          suspended
I observe my face arrested for an instant
in the light from hand to hand combat
I too am Berenguer
                                       on this side of the screen
                                       in this new world  (47-51)

Excerpt from Berenguer's original

¿qué  hacías Ramón Berenguer señor de Elche
                         hijo de Jaime II de Aragón
                         en el año 1300 y pico
un día de lluvia como hoy
en medio de las palmas datileras
que rodeaban aquella ciudad con alminares?

¿acaso orinabas al viento
                        -igual que el joven Arturo Rimbaud-
de espaldas a las huestes feudales
con el asentimiento de las altas palmeras?

[. . .]

miro llover en presente
                                             en suspenso
observo mi rostro detenido un instante
en la luz del combate cuerpo a cuerpo
también soy Berenguer
                                            de este lado de la pantalla
                                            en este nuevo mundo

Easy enough to see how the anonymity requirement would be a problem.  The Foundation published Berenguer’s book anyway, naming her a finalist.  La Dama de Elche was then reprinted in Uruguay, where it won three significant prizes for poetry.  Today it is considered one of Berenguer’s great achievements, and she herself is one of Uruguay’s canonical “Generation of 1945” writers.
As the line about a Berenguer “lord of Elche” demonstrates, the content of the poems reinforces the transatlantic geography of the book’s publication. Ramón B’s emphatically Hispanic urine, originating centuries ago in the village of Elche, crosses into late-twentieth century rainfall to land in a Montevideo garden.
The poet’s insistence on publishing her names thus serves a purpose uniting the complete book.  It upholds a quest for origins across time and space, used to forge trippy intersections between the spaces of ancient Greek literature and contemporary life in the Americas, including the streets and skyscrapers of New York.
Berenguer’s weird title poem also reinforces the reach and implosion of her transatlantic geographies.  She named La Dama de Elche after the Lady of Elche, an object both suggestive and unexplained.  Loosely dated to around 450 BC by most experts in Spain, the Lady is a sculpted bust dug up in the village of Elche in 1897.  It has been displayed in such institutions as the Louvre and Spain’s national archeological museum, as well as the Prado, and for many viewers the Lady is a cipher for an ancient, lost Iberian culture.[3]
Literally dug up out of the earth, the Lady became an excellent and usefully obscure image for Iberian identity at a historical moment when Spain needed to replace its lost imperial symbols with something homegrown.  That is, its empire abroad had collapsed, so twentieth-century Spain needed to reimagine its identity in landlocked terms.
It is not clear who the Lady is (“she” may even be a man).  Some speculate that the figure represents a priestess or member of a royal family, and the artistic lineage of the statue is contested.  One daring art historian from the United States, John Moffit, even published an entire book in the mid-'90s dedicated to the sacrilegious claim that the Lady is a hoax.  In his argument, the ambiguous stone bust is not representative of a deep Iberian past but of modernism’s love affair with lost artistic pasts, which coincided with Spain’s profound need for new images on which to prop its nationalism.
Berenguer focuses on specific aspects of the Lady in her title poem:  a descent into the earth, textures of dirt and stone, details of the Lady’s still-undeciphered stylistics (including the “auriculars”: buns of hair or round accessories by her ears), and the implosion of historical boundaries that the figure of the Lady enables for the speaker/viewer.
Wherever the Lady might or might not originated in reality, Berenguer taps her image in order to tap into a modernist fascination with archaic aesthetics, as well as a search for cultural connections similar to the one that had helped to propel the institutionalization of the actual Lady of Elche sculpture in Spain earlier in the twentieth century.
The poems in the book are carefully placed to suggest a quest -- more specifically, a set of visionary travels by minds and bodies.  Melding the distant past into her present, Berenguer draws on (and openly cites) classic imagery to suggest a cycle in mythological form, complete with descents and ascents through time and space.  La dama de Elche concludes with a poem evoking the search for the origins of poetic language itself. - Kristin Dykstra
https://jacket2.org/commentary/elche

Selection from Identity of Certain Fruits by Amanda Berenguer

Three Uruguayan Poets: Amanda Berenguer, Marosa Di Giorgio. Silvia Guerra

Amanda Berenguer (1921 - 2010) was a vital presence in Uruguayan literary life for more than six decades. She is a key figure in the “Generation of 1945,” known around the world for its energetic experimentation. Her first book appeared in Montevideo in 1940, followed by a steady stream of collections recognized for their excellence. Awards for her contributions included, among many others, the prestigious international Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry (1986) and two national Uruguayan prizes for her collection La dama de Elche. Berenguer’s lifelong dedication to the arts included work with little presses and radio programming, as well as collaborations with dancers and musicians. She is widely regarded, in her country and beyond, as one of Uruguay's greatest poets.