Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Forrest Gander is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University. He is the author of numerous books, including Eye Against Eye. Kent Johnson is Instructor of English and Spanish at Highland Community College. His books include Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War.

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"The continuing Gander/Johnson excavation of Jaime Saenz is by far the most interesting project of Spanish poetry translation in many years. They have taken a poet who was completely unknown in the U.S. and put him on the map as someone who must be read.The Night, this hallucinated journey into the hell of the self, may be Saenz's greatest work, and it may well be that the most original version of the poem is its English translation."--Eliot Weinberger

"The Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz's last major poem is a strange, delicate, anguished work of great emotional power and rich literary value. Expertly translated here, it is a paean to the irreducible sadness and unpredictability which lie at the heart of all the best parts of life. . . and of poetry."--Nicholas Jenkins, Stanford University

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"The continuing Gander/Johnson excavation of Jaime Saenz is by far the most interesting project of Spanish poetry translation in many years. They have taken a poet who was completely unknown in the U.S. and put him on the map as someone who must be read.The Night, this hallucinated journey into the hell of the self, may be Saenz's greatest work, and it may well be that the most original version of the poem is its English translation."--Eliot Weinberger

"The Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz's last major poem is a strange, delicate, anguished work of great emotional power and rich literary value. Expertly translated here, it is a paean to the irreducible sadness and unpredictability which lie at the heart of all the best parts of life. . . and of poetry."--Nicholas Jenkins, Stanford University

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The Night

Princeton University Press

Introduction

Some Things You Should Know about Jaime Saenz

It was with a human leg pilfered from the medical lab that Jaime Saenz, Bolivia's visionary and most influential poet, came home from the university one evening. He was in his mid-forties, still living with his mother, teaching an occasional class on poetry, but obsessed full-time with death, his most constant companion.

In his strange, late poems, visualizing the body as an abode of unfathomable space, as an otherness we carry with us, one that will come to carry us away into itself, Saenz meditated on death. Channeling its plutonic voice, he would come to write, "I am the body who inhabits you, and I am here in the darkness, and I suffer you, and live you, and die you. / But I am not your body. I am the night."

Before writing those lines, though, the young poet first had to bear, through one singular night, for who knows what manner of study, the limb of a cadaver. And in the morning, he punctually presented himself at his clerk's job with the United States Information Service at the U.S. Embassy.

Eventually, of course, the police were summoned. You can't keep a human leg hidden under your bed while you live with your mother.

Still, on weekends afterwards, the poet found occasion to visit the morgue.

His book Recorrer esta distancia (To Cross This Distance) opens with the speaker gazing upon a cadaver. As the poem progresses, we begin to realize that this speaker is a literally disembodied voice meditating upon its own lost body across the distance of the reader's mind.

For Saenz, poetry is the practice of seeing through another consciousness from the afterlife. In the body of a poem, life and death, self and other are enfolded. The final movement of To Cross This Distance is spoken-the whole poem leads up to this-from inside the reader, and with such immanent tenderness that the matter of who touches or is touched, kisses, or is kissed, dissipates in the mystery of fused, shared being.

So Jaime Saenz, throughout his life, "experimented" with death. He was hospitalized three times. He insisted to his friends that when he died, they were to cut his carotid arteries. That promise was kept. Saenz was terrified of waking up in a coffin.

When he writes about death and life giving birth to each other, enchanting each other, expanding the realm of ordinary experience, he isn't being rhetorical or merely reveling in paradox. He is articulating a philosophy.

Or a teleology. In Cochabamba, Luis Antezana, an illustrious literary critic and a close friend of the poet, tells us that Jaime Saenz had chosen the more difficult life of a mystic, the via negativa. Saenz, Antezana said, was looking for a Gnostic vision. He found god in drugs, alcohol, the street, the body, and death. In a way, he was like the medieval flagellates who drove their bodies into delirium and ruin. Saenz felt that since god had not come to him, he would cross this distance himself. He had his sense of humor to protect him as the distance closed.

Humor: there is plenty to go around at a drinking party of Bolivian literati. After we present our first book of translations of Jaime Saenz's poetry (Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz) to a full house at CEDOAL, Bolivia's principal cultural center, people gather at a bar in Sopocachi, a fashionable section of town. When we both stand, somewhat ceremoniously, to make a toast to Saenz, one of Bolivia's prominent critics jumps up, clacks his heels, and extends his arm in mock Fascist salute. No one seems discomfited by the gesture except us.

I lean over and ask a fairly inebriated Humberto Quino, one of Bolivia's big-name poets, what he thinks about Saenz's early Nazi sympathies. "Oh, no, no, it's no big thing, you know, and nothing very surprising," he says. "Saenz was a great poet in the tradition of San Juan and Sor Juana de la Cruz, fascinated by death and the occult, and in his youth he was very seduced by mystical fascist ideology, you see. In politics, he is a bit like Pound, Celine, Heidegger, Mishima, even Pessoa and Borges, eh.... You know Borges spoke fawningly of the dictator Videla, and praised his 'iron hand' during the 'Dirty War,' no? Well, except these guys professed their fascism when they were all grown up! Saenz was a kid strutting around Wiesbaden in high boots. But who gives a damn? Long live poetry!" I mention to him that political allegiance is not considered irrelevant in the United States. "Yes, yes, sure," he says, "but isn't it fantastic that the little fascist came to be such a big and freaky poet? Look, there's a big movement of young, working-class poets and artists in Bolivia right now. They live up there on the hills of El Alto in concrete-block houses with no plumbing. Almost all of them are of the hard left. They want to burn down Kentucky Fried Chicken and send the bourgeoisie to the salt flats of Uyuni to be eaten by flamingoes. Who is their number one poetic hero? Saenz! Isn't that beautiful? Long live poetry!"

On his wedding night, Jaime Saenz bought and brought home a panther.

It slept with the newlyweds until it grew too large and his wife finally said that it was either her or the panther.

La Paz, That Thin-Aired and Scarcely Believable City

Without foreknowledge, we arrive in La Paz on the day of the solstice, the Aymara new year. The streets are bright with the breathy, joyous crossing melodies of pipes and Andean flutes. Unlike most other Latin American capitals, La Paz is an overwhelmingly indigenous city. Most of the women along the street are Aymara, cholas paceas in elaborate heavy skirts, called polleras, and derby hats, their rainbow-colored rebozos (portage or carrying shawls) full as spinnakers over their backs.

What fills the spinnakers blows toward the past. And yet the women on the street tread forward, hunched, their domed bowlers like dark beacons. Invisible, the aparapitas in their stitched, bricolaged raiment, drink to the dregs, barely speaking, sunk in dank, unmarked bodegas, knowing, as Saenz affirmed, that they know nothing and know everything, everything that matters in the end. The man with a briefcase smartly clicks his little cell phone shut and squats, unsmiling, to have his future read in cards by a brujo.

The city clings to a landscape that resembles a grooved funnel. A mountain-rimmed vortex of congested streets eases us down to Plaza San Francisco and the central street that drains away into the wealthier neighborhoods of La Paz.

Pigeons and vendors and everyone waiting for anyone loiter in Plaza San Francisco beside a church notable for its baroque-mestizo architecture. Even in June, Bolivia's winter, the sun is intense. A businessman holds his newspaper to the side of his head while he talks to a pineapple vendor. Hawkers hold forth fake fossil trilobites. The voceadores-those who shout the litany of stops from passing minibuses-can be heard here as on every street in La Paz. And scores of bootblacks ply the crowd. The younger ones wear ski masks, despite the heat, in order to keep from being recognized by family or friends.

One approaches us. His boot brush blurs. The drying foam of his spit flecks the wool hole around his mouth. I smile and give him a tip, and he winks and says in a seductive voice, "Nos...