Jaime Saenz translated by Forrest Gander & Kent Johnson

A poète maudit, Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) became one of Latin America's greatest 20th century poets without venturing from La Paz, Bolivia, more than a few times. Struggling his whole life with alcoholism, he was apocalyptic and occult in his politics, habituous of slum taverns, unashamedly bisexual, insistently nocturnal in his artistic affairs, and secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers. The semantic innovation in his poems is notable in the odd heterogeneity of formal and tonal structures which careen unabashedly between modes and moods: now archly lyrical, now arcanely symbolic, now colloquial, now trance-like. By privileging non-linear time, suspended states of knowing, and mystical realms of death, and by conflating memory, death, linguistics, and sensual awareness into any given moment of experience, Saenz connects his poetry to the visionary world of the Kallawaya, Aymara, and Quechua with which he was fascinated. Saenz's literary legacy is co-extensive with a fierce compassion and solidarity with the destitute, the desperate, and the disenfranchised. The poems published here are part of Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, U of CA Press, 2001.

Forrest Gander is the author of Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower, both from New Directions. He is the translator of No Shelter: Selected Poems of Pura Lopez Colome (forthcoming) and the editor of Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women. Immanent Visitor: The Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, translated by Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, will be published by University of California Press in 2001.

Kent Johnson is the translator of A Nation of Poets: Writings from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua (West End Press, 1985), and the editor of Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry (Shambhala, 1990) and Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1993).

                —Kent Johnson



To Cross This Distance

                        To the image of Puraduralubia

I


I am divided from myself by the distance I find myself in,

the one who is dead is divided from death by a great distance.

I plan to cross this distance, resting on the way.

Face up, in the dwelling of desire,

stock still, in my place—opposite the locked door,

with a winter's light at my side.



In the corners of my room, in the chair's arena.

With wavering memory splitting off from the void
—on the ceiling of the vault,

the one who is dead must communicate with death.



Contemplating the bones on the plank, numbering the darknesses with my fingers starting from you.

Seeing that things are, I fill with desire.

And I find myself crossing a great distance.



II


Like nocturnal air, the Festival of the Spirit falls away,

like the ladder—leaning against a wall to hear the word—falls away,

like the line I once traced, the line your shadow fled, falls away.



Like the smoke in the braziers with the incense and the vapors spreading,

longing for voices,

like the lights and the mirrors rising toward the winter skies,

with the vanished memory of the customs and of those who are definitively distant in the distance,

thus it is that the implements and the skulls are no longer implements nor skulls,

in the ceremonies of winter, they are no longer used.



III


At the touch of the fleeting secret, of stopped time, of self-consuming fire, and of ice, present and eternal,

every eye, every image, will blaze up and burn.

Every hollow within the earth, every darkness that falls, will forever remain.

(If you're a sorcerer, laugh. But if not, hearing the devil's on your tail, don't laugh).

With the passing of the years and the turning of these worlds and the lights I've gathered from contemplating the stars, I've become aware.

In the torrential waters every soul dissolves into universal soul.



IV


The immense malaise cast by shadows, the melancholic visions surging from the night,

everything terrifying, everything cruel, that without reason, that without name,

one has to take it, who knows why.



If you have nothing to eat but garbage, don't say a word.

If the garbage makes you sick, don't say a word.

If they cut off your feet, if they boil your hands, if your tongue rots, if your spine splits in two, if your soul fines down to nothing, don't say a word.

If they poison you, don't say a word, even if your bowels slide from your mouth and your hair stands straight up; even if your eyes well with blood, don't say a word.

If you feel good, don't feel good. If you fall behind, don't fall behind. If you die, don't die. If you're sad, don't be sad. Don't say a word.

Living is hard; it's hard work to not say a word.

Putting up with people without saying a word is tough.

It's very hard—inasmuch as they expect to be understood without saying a word—
to understand people without saying a word.

It's terribly difficult yet very easy to be a decent person;

the truly difficult thing is to not say a word.



V


The hatred which the father who is son professes to the son who is father is father of the hatred which the son who is father professes to the father who is son.

Everyone conspires against everyone and each bites and tears apart the other; they never starve and they eat shit, whether they actually eat shit or don't eat it, traffic or don't traffic in silks and liquors and all kinds of commodities,

they laugh at humankind and cut diamonds, they stop and take up dominoes, now racing, now betting on every kind of game,

they go to the country and sail at their leisure, they travel on train, they fly by plane, they eat cookies, and pass out kisses and greetings,

well-pleased with their spit-shined shoes, with their slick, styled hair, with their bronzed complexions, and their crocodile-skin wallets.

They grow thoughtful reading the papers, they sigh with calculated restraint, they cough with self-satisfaction, and fall ill every now and then, as prescribed by rituals of decorum,

and you just have to see the look they get as they climb into the jet.

The majestic air they adopt when they're talking shop, their severity when they mention ethics,

the casual grace with which their noses are blown, that slight tilt of the head, that pleasantness, that I don't know what, with which they grin,

you just have to see that rare people-person way, the zeal, the assertiveness, the knack, the secret charm they exude in all their exploits,

and the animus in the gesture; that disconcerting subtlety with which they opine on art and psychology,

the wise judgment and authority on human pain, and with what anguish they offer their opinion;

you just have to see the enormous nobility of the look with which they forgive the failings of mere mortals;

the consummate technique with which they chew and swallow a thousand pills to keep them plump and rosy;

the stylishness with which they arrive to consult the shrink, just in time to check their watch and get nervous—a little nervous, not too much, with aristocratic smirk and nobleness of visage;

you just have to see the stunning grace with which they move in the world and the importance they concede to their lives;

the transcendent meaning in every motion and, even more, in each of their nervous tics, even when they have none;

you just have to see the heroic poses, the facility with which they assume a fierce tone of voice,

the tremendous audacity of resolve as they die of fright, the shudder in the asshole when they freeze with fear,

and the ayees and the yikees, the owies and the yowies, when they cry for help the moment they sense their precious lives besieged by some ghost,

and the cock-strut they do to hide the terror that consumes them;

you just have to see what awaits them, a demon coiling inside,

which will rend them apart without pause or pity, thanks to your silence and by deed of your silence.



VI


I feel the coming of a dark day, a closed space, an incomprehensible event, a night endless as immortality.

What I feel has nothing to do with me, nor with you; it's nothing personal, nothing particular, this thing I feel;

but it has to do with I don't know what
—perhaps the world, or the kingdoms of the world, or the mysterious enchantments of the world;

one looks and sees, across the waters, a profound fissure.

One can perceive, through the odor of things and through the forms they assume, the exhaustion of things.

In what grows, in what has ceased to grow, in what echoes, in what stays, in what doesn't stay, in the soundless air, in the metamorphosis of the insect, in the murmuring of trees,

one can sense the joy of a coming end.

The devouring darknesses, dying to devour—the allotment extinguished, nothing shall be.

Save perhaps a breeze, high above some place, maybe deep inside some place,

floating on the farthest waters.

The gasping without end or beginning, a shroud for stillness,

enshrouding the circular motions of the eternal return
—I don't know how to explain, I don't know how to name this feeling I feel.



VII


At the inexplicable site, exactly where ruin and reunion have taken place,

the loveliness of life is a truth that one neither can nor should deny.

The beauty of life,

through the miracle of living.

The loveliness of life,

which remains,

through the miracle of dying.



Life flows, passes and soars, coils into an unreachable innerness.

In the aura of the passerby, felt in the pulse,

in the wind, quavering with the leaving and coming of the passersby,

in the sayings, in the pleadings, in the shouts, in the smoke
—in the streets, with a light sometimes on the walls, and other times with a darkness.

In that gazing upon things with which animals tend to gaze;

in that gazing of the human, with which the human tends to gaze at the gaze of the animal who gazes upon things.

In the weaving of cloth,

in iron where iron is iron.

In the table,

in the house.

In the river's edge.

In the moisture of the air.

In the heat of summer, in the cold of winter, in the light of spring
—in an opening and closing of eyes.

Tearing open the horizon or entombing itself in the abyss,

real life rears its head and goes under.



VIII


In a burning and pulsing force I long for enchantment.

In the ancient silence of a wind I long for enchantment.

In the isolate world from which nothing flows, save only lost enchantment, which returns me to you,

I long for the gallows where once I saw myself hanging to gaze fully at you,

in all your movements, your ways
—I long for the years, the dates, the exact days that are called today,

the exact instants that are called now—the tomorrow that has been, the yesterday that is to be,

I long for a certain wound that was yours, that gathered into a certain wound that was mine,

which tunneled into the abyss of your eyes
—into the abyss of your eyes, in which I long for the abyss of your eyes.



IX


With shadows and prodigious pirouettes the jugglers emerge from the night.

With elbows and kicks they force their way through the crowd of stunned celebrities who stare dazzled.

Suddenly, they roll out to the center of the ring, doing stunts.

They cinch their belts and tumble into the jumble of dwarf ponies who just now appear; they wink their eyes and keep tumbling,

and they sip coffee and eat apples, they do this, do the other thing, and do something else altogether,

and this is what they do, and the other thing, and something else altogether, and not something else, until the stage resounds as someone comes on,

and eating garlic the whistle-blower makes the rafters resound

and everyone cowers and hunches over, and withdraws inward, and is absorbed in thought,

in the midst of a deep silence that reigns the lights go up, the lights don't go up, the lights go off,

to the spell of bewitched dogs bursting into the ring doing spectacular flips,

uncertainty descends and then doesn't descend with the bewitched dogs

who begin to trot all around the roundness of the circle in finest style, surmounting obstacles that are inherently insurmountable,

with graceful contortions and with suitable and regal step,

very conscious of the admiring admiration with which the admired admirers admire them,

with thousands and thousands of eyes that anxiously turn and roll with the spins and spinnings of an apparatus that is truly ostentatious,

of perilous trajectories, truly intricate, but not nonsensical.

And with the dust they kick-up, and with the sawdust they kick-up, and with the ponies they kick-up, and with the jugglers they kick-up, and with the garbage they kick-up, and with the midgets these bewitched dogs kick-up,

a lady of a beauty never seen rises up, and, after removing her eyeballs and wiping her spectacles, after letting rip a scream, she passes out,

and gibberish abounds, exaltation abounds, chocolate and joy, in joyous hearts, to the rhythm of the general delight,

to the rhyme with which these bewitched dogs rise up, for the reason of removing one's eyes, in the rhyme of wiping one's spectacles, for the reason of letting rip a scream and passing out, without rhyme or reason, to the rhythm of universal consternation,

to the rhyme of a hound blown all out of proportion, for the reason of throwing itself into barking, in the rhyme of leaping, for the reason of wetting the wall, in the rhyme of clawing up the post that supports the hounds, for the reason of going off with them,

to the rhyme of interring themselves in an indeterminate and unknown world, hostile, covered with burrs and devoid of daisies,

to the rhythm of an earthly man washing his hands, so generous, so giving, so kind, who looks at them with impotent rage and snorts like a bellows,

with pathetic gestures of astonishment, with powerful magnetic stares,

with the neck of a bull and a devil's horns, with the head of a plover and the back of an ursus, with a blowfly buzzing in the skull,

with powdered cheeks and gloved hands, advancing with hasty and desperate step,

who enters and sits center ring, making sorrowful signs and then starts to weep,

provoking a circular movement at the expense of the crowd which, in effect, spills forth in a scramble to surround the stricken one,

engendering a ring with a hundred little ringlets thanks to many other people who have emerged from nothing less than nothingness,

thanks to the sorrowful signs made by the stricken one hoping to avoid just that,

except that all the disguises and masks and foremen, the incompetent and the competent surround him, all the raiment and the make-up and the characters, with the tributes and rituals of flatter,

the mortals and immortals, large and small, white and black, women and not-women, men and not-men surround him,

implicated and not implicated in the signs he makes, while he makes those he doesn't make but doesn't make them, which he doesn't unmake but makes, except what he makes; and it is what he makes.



X


In the world's deep realms are great spaces—a nothingness ruled over by nothingness itself,

which is cause and origin of the first terror, of thought and echo.

Inconceivable depths exist, hollows before whose allure, before whose haunting spell,

one would surely and simply die.

Sounds one would surely yearn to hear, forms and visions one would surely yearn to see,

things one would surely yearn to touch, revelations one would surely yearn to know,

who knows with what secret yearning and coming to know who knows what.


                        ***


In the essential soul of the world's synchrony and duration,

buried in the abyss from which the world arose, and embedded in the marrow of the world,

an odor can be sensed, which you will recognize at once, for you have never known another like it;

the odor of truth, the only one, the odor of the abyss—and you will have to know it.

Because only when you come to know it will you understand how it's always been true that wisdom coheres in the absence of air.




In the deepest darkness of the world wisdom will offer itself, in the hermetic kingdoms of the soul;

in the vicinities of fire and in fire itself, in which the selfsame fire together with air is devoured by the darkness.

And it is because no one has any idea of the abyss, and because no one has known the abyss, nor has sensed the odor of the abyss,

that wisdom cannot be spoken of among men, among the living.





While alive, man will not be able to understand the world; man ignores the fact that as long as he doesn't leave off living, he will not be wise.

He fears everything that borders wisdom; as soon as he can't understand, he distrusts
—he understands nothing outside the living.



And I say that one should strive to be dead.

To do so at all costs, before dying. One would need to do everything possible to be dead.

The waters tell you of it—fire, air, and the light, in clearest speech.

To be dead.

Love tells you of it, the world and all manner of things, to be dead.

Darkness tells nothing. It is pure silence.



One has to think of the sealed spaces. Of the vaults opening beneath the oceans.

Of the caverns and the grottos—one has to think of the fissures, of the infinite tunnels
in the umbrae.

If you think of yourself, all your soul and body, you will be the world—in its innerness and in its visible forms.

Become accustomed to thinking intently of one thing; everything is dark.

What is true, what is real, what exists; being and essence, it is one and dark.

Thus, darkness is the world's law; fire fans the darkness and goes out—it is devoured by darkness.

I say this: it is necessary to think of the world—what is inside the world gives me much to think about. I am dark.

I'm not interested in thinking of the world beyond the world; light is interrupting, as is living—which is transitory.



What could living ever have to do with life; living is one thing, life is another.

Life and death are one.



XI


A distance crossed, an uninhabited city. In a lost city,

an inhabited city—time never was.

The rain's reflection, another rain.

A greeting, a sign—they greet you and they go.

A melody heard, a forgetting—a forgetting and who knows what,

a spell of emptiness,

a scent,

a glance
—which memory does not drain off, which memory does not wash back.

And that is all.

Nothing and no one remains; it is one.

It all remains with one, and nothing remains
—matter, the earth. What is not touched, what is touched,

what is not,

everything is and remains.

What has been, what is, what is to be, there is no time
—there is nothing—everything is.



Don't feel hurt
—don't hurt one bit.

Time never was; nothing has ever been; the human has everything
—hope is a grave thing.

To say farewell and become the farewell,

that is what fits.



XII


What hand will have been touched by this hand.

What mouth will have been kissed by this mouth.

What eyes will have been seen by these eyes.

Amidst what paths, amidst what darknesses, will these eyes have gazed at me.

Where will this hand have been found by my hand; when will this hand have been revealed by my hand.

On what day, what hour, in what place, will I have found this body and this soul I love.

In what mysterious moment will I have found my soul and my body to love as I do this soul and this body that I love.


***


This body, this soul, are here.

I am and am here in this soul, in this body, in this soul that I love and this body that I love.

By way of its breath, in the invisible and the concealed, I found this soul.

In the way of gazing out and being of this body—in the way of being of its vestment,

in the vestment's dark and subtle way of being present and not present, I found the secret,

I found presence.



With a sound echoing here, with a remote antiquity,

                in this distance

                rain is falling;

with a gentle breeze of shadows and lights, in which this phantasmal country vanishes bit by bit
                —with a throbbing and with a song,

with a dream that is far down, this being sleeps in the splendours of a limbo,



in the flickering splendours of a limbo.



From very distant places, from very deep spaces, with the breath of joy in which the earth is swaying,

an air arrives
—the air that arrives at the latest hour, charged with premonition.

At enchantment's final hour, in which the earth sinks away somewhere,

                beyond the wall,

                where this body that I love is lying,

                where this soul that I love is lying.



Beyond the beyond of all the paths,

in the transcendence of the scent of this body that I love,

in the transcendence of the scent of this soul that I love.



      * * *



Xin Hong translated by Denis Mair

One of the more interesting poets to recently move to New York City is Xin Hong.

Xin Hong, Chinese poet, was born in 1970 in the city of Dalian. She went to college in Beijing, where she became a poet and freelance writer. In 1997, she came to the United States. Her poems and essays were published in many public and underground literature journals in Mainland of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, including Hua Cheng, Shan Hua, Tian Ya, Global Youth, and Chuang Shi Ji. And now, she appears to be thriving in New York City.

The translation of Xin Hong's poem, "Dark Shadows of Things", was done by Denis Mair. He is an American poet and translator of many Chinese poets, including Yan Li and Bei Ling. Mair lived in China between 1986-1989. He is a coordinator for the literature journal TAMPLE and currently works as a translator for Tiandijiao Temple.

                —Leonard Schwartz



Dark Shadows of Things


(1)

Could have been shorter. Having dragged on so, even a needle's jab
Cannot make the night feel pain, cannot stir this still wind
To rustle. The same disaster has descended
On you twice; Like a dream that dims abruptly
Right at dawn, to leave a mark on your daylight skin.

No one recall which fallen leaf is the autumn night you walked on,
In which window is stillness growing wordlessly?
No man's hand to shield from ill-meant glare
Your palm-lines gone awry. No tree can replace your tree,
A lawn reduced at shocking speed to a deserted roof.

A certain bird, as its wings brush the heavens in flight
And its shadow falls on ground where wind is blowing
Becomes another bird, dragging an unmatched pair
Of shoes, and as it zigzags through a thicket
An overlooked skull comes back to reeling shoulders.


(2)

Soiled fingers of night are refused by the lamp, some old batteries
Squeeze out a lament. In the face of a window lacking a world
No one maintains the milk-white calm
Of Brodsky's pitcher. If it's an empty room
Then don't bother. You know, two people are something definite.

When you carelessly lose a shoe, how can you foretell
The other will go on being lonely?
Not because of you foot, but for the shadow it cast
Once picked up, it will never fall that precise way,
As hollow as sound, as unreliable as a chair.

The postman's hand is knocked by an iron door. Rain comes
From darkness to urge the palling of time's memory, like butterflies
Turned to powder, a person might be many people.
They seem to be here, yet seem not to be,
Saying they love you, yet really loving themselves.


(3)

Wind has gone, and the sky in my foggy body
Finds clear blue. On this lone, clear-headed afternoon
Newspaper on table serves for knife and fork. If not
For repeated thoughts of the same fish
A whole pond of rainwater would soon dry up. Shadows of time

Fall like alligator tears between the clock's hands
We cannot rotate the masts of time, just as we can't
Stop an incoming tide. At this moment who hears
The empty bottle shatter? When jagged facets spread light-flecks on skin
Of a fruit, we find ourselves doubting the span of visible years

Like the roulette game we bet on so intently once, if ever
Its blood mounts to springtime in a horse's eye, our hunches
Will see further into the darkness. Cast aside the evening
And empty field of twilight, enter straight into time's core
Like a wineglass that seeks miragelike, fleeting dizziness.


(4)

The beginning of things is only a dream. When its winter hair
Hangs long, right down to roots of plants, vacant slumber
And the body, rise up as if out of dust
Like a headache you gain no distance from, nor can you
Bend it back as if it never were.

But however deep grass grows, it does not bury moonlight,
My not being you hardly makes me your hiding place
Once the flame goes out, a moth had better stay in its cocoon.
That's the way it is. The world darkens just like the book you open
—like a whirlpool dwindling, shadowy and hard to distinguish.

You or she, Who else are we? More like blue than red.
More like rope than rope. That's all there is to it.
Most of the time, tears fly into our eyes.
Your sorrow can be pulled out of the shadows of things, and their reminders.


March 1996
Xin Hong
translated by Denis Mair, 1998