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 veremos, Seor Afortunado" (We'll be seeing one another, Fortuned Sir).

On the cathedral's facade, Inca gods and snakes and fruit mix it up with the Apostles. And in each of the thousands of stone blocks there are fading Greek letters, carved there by indigenous masons, almost four hundred years back. It's a mystery, those letters. Some think there may be a code written into the cathedral-cut and scrambled by the toilers. Inside, the church is vast and dark; garish, peeling saints glare sternly down at the supplicants, or peer erotically heavenward, stigmatic and aureoled, bolted to the walls from their backs with massive mahogany screws.

In the cathedral square, an old man indicates to me with one of his stumps to put the coins in his coat pocket.

Those who dare to cross the class 5 rapids of Avenida Prado put their lives at stake.

A woman is singing, "Sopa de cerdo, un peso, un peso."

Across town, hundreds of men and women are marching and chanting slogans for workers' rights. A taxi driver explains to us the merits of nationalizing the petroleum industry. In a bar near the university, artists and writers drink and joke in groups or read alone at a table with an orange juice. On our first day in La Paz, we are told that a llama fetus is buried under every house and every municipal building in the city. For luck. We return to our own neighborhood and an alley full of hechiceros (shamans) who promise to read the future in patterns of coca leaves they scatter over a blanket.

Imaginary and Real Photographs

Now a respected poet in his own right, one of Jaime Saenz's protgs describes him seated on the curb with an old man by Plaza San Francisco. Saenz spoke little Aymara. The other man spoke little Spanish. They were passing a bottle back and forth.

On the Aymara new year, the day we arrive, the hechiceros on Avenida Linares take big swigs of clear alcohol and then spit it back onto the fire, yelling a blessing, the fire fueled by rags, herbs, fruit, llama fetuses, palm votives of Pachamama. When the men spit, the flames spurt up, speaking back. The bottle is passed from hand to hand. The fire grows and smells acrid, weird. Men in suits hold the hands of hechiceros and kiss them on the cheek. People arrive, bearing the clear alcohol as a gift. In this crowd of celebrants we are the strangers, looking in. The bottle is never offered us. No one looks at us nor speaks to us. We are simply not there.

Late at night, at the house of Jaime's younger sister, we are shown many photographs. One of them is of his only child, the girl born of his German Jewish wife, who was an organizer for the Bolivian fascists just before World War II. Jaime Saenz never saw his daughter at the age she is in this photograph, about sixteen, with long dark hair and dramatic, sad, mascaraed eyes. After the war, when the child was still a baby, her unhappy mother, giving up on the marriage (and, one presumes, the politics), hauled her back to Germany.

Only with Saenz could something like this be real: a Jewish Nazi spouse, with an Amazonian panther on their conjugal bed. So, yes, let's talk about it: It is the most discomfiting fact that Saenz was a member of the Bolivian Nazi Youth in his late teens. And it is most discomfiting he never went on record as regretting it. In love with the idea of the German-an idea of considerable historical weight in Bolivia-he joined when he was around sixteen and sailed to Germany, with his twenty-five-member scholarship brigade, in September, 1938. He remained until late 1939, working on construction projects and undergoing rigorous military training.

Saenz claimed with bravado to have fought against Titoist forces in Yugoslavia, but this has been disproved by facts of chronology. One would like to be able to say that he unambiguously renounced his political past. But it is simply not clear what his attitude toward fascism became later in life. He remained an avid reader of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and German Romanticism until his death. Like Pound, he elected to distance himself via silence from the matter of his earlier affiliations. Whatever the case, this much can be said: There is no evident mark of anti-Semitism or racism in his voluminous work (poetry, fiction, criticism, drama, and nonfiction); to the contrary, a profound and prolific empathy for the oppressed-the non-Spanish, the laborers, the homosexuals, the outcasts-is to be found there. And in the great indigenous and working class revolution of 1952 against the right-wing oligarchy that had long ruled his nation, Saenz put his military training from Germany to use, fighting on the barricades with miners, shopkeepers, students, and Aymara. Juan Lechin, Latin America's leading Trotskyist, and the country's most influential Marxist thinker, became a close friend and correspondent. And in The Night, Saenz paints the plotters of the attempted fascist coup of October, 1979 (led by the infamous General Natush Busch) as flesh-eating demons. How to explain this aparapita's coat of ideological paradoxes? Can it be explained? In what way, exactly-with this poet whose very grammar is Janus-faced with paradox-should it be?

A photograph records a meeting of Saenz with two acolytes of the Krupp Workshops, the notorious, highly influential group who gathered around Jaime Saenz. A brilliant, outsider poet, Saenz would advertise the Krupp Workshops by posting fliers that described a variety of bizarre literary exercises the attendants might expect to attempt. The first page of one of those announcements reads that the "Convocation" has been beamed by means of telepathy to all the "subsidiary" cacho (the Andean version of "craps") branches of the world. Under "Retadores" (Challengers) are the compulsory pseudonyms to be adopted by the players elected from the many applicants. Saenz was always game master, the "Jurjizada." It was a kind of Jack Spicer Magic Workshop, but more demanding.

On Miraflores Avenue, there are four different houses in which Saenz lived. As each lease expired, with rent payments due, he moved farther away from the city into quiet, which he loved, but also into isolation

The opening of The Night records that aloneness in the last house in which he lived, La Casa del Poeta, and the terrors that often entered it:

The night, its feelers twitching in the distance the night locked into a box swallowed by the night in the desk in the nook while my eyes and especially that space between my eyes and nostrils stretches the length of a two-story gutter startled and unnerved, I'm suddenly aware-there's a tubular cocoon, spun between my eyes, through which I see only the night, fractured and phantasmagoric thanks to a force from who knows where the space of my dream has been split by a wall on this side sleep is not possible and on the other it's perfectly possible but nevertheless thoroughly impossible the wall, in fact, is not a wall but a live thing that writhes and throbs and this wall is me

He rarely left his room in his last years. To see him, it was necessary to take a taxi to his house. He might be found lying in bed, drinking a cup of mat with seven sugars and reading a new poem to his friend, the young poet Blanca Wiethchter. It is her dissertation for the Sorbonne on his body of work that will first bring him major critical attention.

The memorable evening at Blanca's art- and antique-filled house with her husband Alberto Villalpando, and their daughters and their companions: Blanca brings out Saenzian treasures bequeathed to her-photos, letters, the original typescripts of The Cold, Death by Feel, To Cross This Distance, all with many notations in his hand. And there is an unpublished libretto for an opera scored by Alberto, Bolivia's most famous composer. The opera is never produced because Saenz decides at the last minute that he will not allow it. He apparently never explains why. "All he said on the phone," says Alberto, "is 'No, it's impossible, it can't be done.' So I said, 'What the hell do you mean, Jaime? We've spent more than two years on this thing!' And he just says, 'No, no, it's impossible, it can't be done.' And that was the last time we ever directly spoke."

El Montculo is a park at the precipice of a hill in the Sopocachi zone that Saenz loved to visit. At the upper end of a cobblestone street, it is a lover's park with baroque colonnades and the stanzas of a tango to Mount Illimani inscribed on four rocks along the entrance path. From El Montculo it is possible to see the distant, upper limits of the city, where streets abrupt into sheer cliff faces which, when it rains, crumble into the lower precincts of the neighborhood appropriately called Tembladerani. Along those cliffs, Saenz and his friend Leonardo Garcia Pabn used to hike toward the massive vertical limestone rise called Llojata. Here, they could take one step forward, behind Llojata, and enter a sepulchral silence. Or they could take one step backwards and hear again the clamor of the city echoing up the mountain.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Nightby Jaime Saenz Copyright © 2007 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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