Poets From Chile

"The cultural invasion is like a leafy tree which prevents us from seeing our own sun, sky and stars. Therefore in order to be able to see the sky above our heads, our task is to cut this tree off at the roots. US imperialism understands very well the magic of communication through music and persists in filling our young people with all sorts of commercial tripe. With professional expertise they have taken certain measures: first, the commercialization of the so-called ‘protest music’; second, the creation of ‘idols’ of protest music who obey the same rules and suffer from the same constraints as the other idols of the consumer music industry – they last a little while and then disappear. Meanwhile they are useful in neutralizing the innate spirit of rebellion of young people. The term ‘protest song’ is no longer valid because it is ambiguous and has been misused. I prefer the term ‘revolutionary song’."

"Love of my home, my wife and my children./ Love for the earth that helps me live./ Love for education and of work./ Love of others who work for the common good./ Love of justice as the instrument that provides equilibrium for human dignity./ Love of peace in order to enjoy one's life./ Love of freedom, but not the freedom acquired at the expense of others’ freedom, but rather the freedom of all./ Love of freedom to live and exist, for the existence of my children, in my home, in my town, my city, among neighbouring people./ Love for freedom in the environment in which we are required to forge our destiny./ Love of freedom without yokes: nor ours nor foreign."

"And in the world, a heart of darkness, a fire zone Where poets speak their heart, then bleed for it Jara sang, his song a weapon in the hands of love You know his blood still cries from the ground It runs like a river, runs to the sea It runs like a river to the sea"

"When a rural Ecuadorian, in the heart of the mountains, listens on his transistor radio to the Chilean Victor Jara singing his “Plegaria a un Labrador” (A farmers prayer) he is, although he may not realize it, listening to a piece of folklore. Such songs belong to a group of sometimes ephemeral phenomena which might be called “subjective folklore”, and which have not yet been given a place among the categories made by folklore specialists."

"Please remember Victor Jara, In the Santiago Stadium, Es verdad – those Washington Bullets again."

"Victor Jara, assassinated by the Chilean dictatorship, Benjo Cruz fallen during his participation in the guerilla war of Teoponte, Jorge Salerno, executed during the Pando takeover, are living symbols of the impossibility our imperialist enemy has at silencing the collective voice of our Latin American people. “There are musicians who are only musicians” Haydée Santamaria once said, and she added that what was true about Victor, Jorge y Benjo was that “they were musicians that loved the people”. To these group of voices belongs Victor Jara, whom I personally knew, with whom I sang; we would dialogued and discussed each others’ songs, united in the objective of finding a new humanity."

"Muere lentamente quien no viaja, quien no lee, quien no oye música, quien no encuentra gracia en sí mismo. Muere lentamente quien destruye su amor propio, quien no se deja ayudar..."

"Preguntaréis ¿por qué su poesía no nos habla del sueño, de las hojas, de los grandes volcanes de su país natal?'Venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles, venid a ver la sangre por las calles!"

"Preguntaréis: ¿Y dónde están las lilas? ¿Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas? ¿Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba sus palabras llenándolas de agujeros y pájaros?"

"Si me preguntáis en dónde he estado debo decir "Sucede." Debo de hablar del suelo que oscurecen las piedras, del río que durando se destruye: no sé sino las cosas que los pájaros pierden, el mar dejado atrás, o mi hermana llorando. ¿Por qué tantas regiones, por qué un día se junta con un día? ¿Por qué una negra noche se acumula en la boca? ¿Por qué muertos?"

"No quiero para mí tantas desgracias. No quiero continuar de raíz y de tumba, de subterráneo solo, de bodega con muertos ateridos, muriéndome de pena."

"Enterrado junto al cocotero hallarás más tarde el cuchillo que escodí allí por temor de que me mataras, y ahora repentinamente quisiera oler su acero de cocina acostumbrado al peso de tu mano y al brillo de tu pie: bajo la humedad de la tierra, entre las sordas raíces, de los lenguajes humanos el pobre sólo sabría tu nombre, y la espesa tierra no comprende tu nombre hecho de impenetrables y substancias divinas."

"Estoy solo entre materias desvencijadas, la lluvia cae sobre mí, y se me parece, se me parece con su desvarío,solitaria en el mundo muerto, rechazada al caer, y sin forma obstinada."

"Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido."

"Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche."

"Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente, y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca."

"Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos."

"¿Quién escribe tu nombre con letras de humo entre las estrellas del sur? Ah déjame recordarte cómo eras entonces, cuando aún no existías."

"Un pilar soportando consuelos Y no me digan nada ¿Y bien? ¿Te sana el metaloide pálido? Tengo un miedo terrible de ser un animal íY, si después de tantos palabras La cólera que quiebra al hombre en niños"

"Sólo con una ardiente paciencia conquistaremos la espléndida ciudad que dará luz, justicia y dignidad a todos los hombres. Así la poesía no habrá cantado en vano."

"Es la hora, amor mío, de apartar esta rosa sombría, cerrar las estrellas, enterrar la ceniza en la tierra: y, en la insurrección de la luz, despertar con los que despertaron o seguir en el sueño alcanzando la otra orilla del mar que no tiene otra orilla."

"Allí en Rangoon comprendí que los dioses eran tan enemigos como Dios del pobre ser humano. Dioses de alabastro tendidos como ballenas blancas, dioses dorados como las espigas, dioses serpientes enroscados al crimen de nacer, budhas desnudos y elegantes sonriendo en el coktail de la vacía eternidad como Cristo en su cruz horrible, todos dispuestos a todo, a imponernos su cielo, todos con llagas o pistola para comprar piedad o quemarnos la sangre, dioses feroces del hombre para esconder la cobardía, y allí todo era así, toda la tierra olía a cielo, a mercadería celeste."

"Y algo golpeaba en mi alma, fiebre o alas perdidas, y me fui haciendo solo, descifrando aquella quemadura y escribí la primera línea vaga, vaga, sin cuerpo, pura, tontería pura sabiduría del que no sabe nada, y vi de pronto el cielo desgranado y abierto."

"¿Sabes que en las calles no hay nadie y adentro de las casas tampoco?'Sólo hay ojos en las ventanas. Si no tienes dònde dormir toca una puerta y te abrirán, te abrirán hasta cierto punto y verás que hace frío adentro, que aquella casa está vacía, y no quiere nada contigo, no valen nada tus historias, y si insistes con tu ternura te muerden el perro y el gato."

"Mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada"

"Debajo de tu piel vive la luna."

"By far the most inspiring talent from south of the border since the '70s. A Chilean who lived for years in Mexico and ultimately settled near Barcelona before he died in 2003 at age 50, Bolaño's oeuvre is slowly making its way into English... His hypnotizing style and restless approach to plot are at once refreshing and humbling."

"Bolaño has a laser eye and a frank, confessional first-person voice as relentless as it is irresistible. His "infra-realism" sears through the book's world-weary characters... Just behind the nervy, deadpan narrative a total breakdown perpetually looms... Bolaño's writing... is an incantation — against horror, against defeat, against oblivion..."

"Bolaño's narrative style is fragmented and loaded. It is also full of a strange kind of gallows humour, as we are swept along by stories that are invented and presented entirely convincingly, only to be suddenly brought up short by a reminder that this has not been done innocently."

"Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world."

"The moment we "discover" a favorite writer is like our experience of a cataclysmic event — we can remember precisely where we were and what we were doing when it occurred... So I assume I'll always recall the doctor's waiting room where I opened a dimpled, out-of-date issue of The New Yorker and found Roberto Bolaño's story "Gómez Palacio." For the first time, I was glad the doctor was running late, so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new."

"I still don’t want to accept that W. G. Sebald and Roberto Bolaño, working only yesterday, are gone today. They each published for only a decade before dying in their fifties, but not before expanding our idea of what a novel can be. Half of what’s published these days bears their marks, and so it’s impossible for me to think of writers working today without thinking first of them."

"Who said literature has no real power to affect history? Not Bolaño — for him, literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification. The mythmakers, he suggests, certainly do matter."

"Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. In his novel The Savage Detectives, two avid young Latino poets never lose faith in their rarefied art no matter the vicissitudes of life, age and politics. If they are sometimes ridiculous, they are always heroic. But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella By Night in Chile, that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it's a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño's genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else?"

"More recent writers who have knocked me dead include Roberto Bolaño, Ruth Ozeki, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Isabel Quintero and N. K. Jemisin."

"He began to think about semblance, as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself. He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak, he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules...it set new rules."

"Darling, Juan de Dios Martínez would say to her sometimes, sweetheart, love, and in the darkness she would tell him to be quiet and then suck every last drop from him- of semen? of his soul? of the little life he felt, at the time, remained to him? They made love, at her express request, in semidarkness."

"About happiness he said not a word, I suppose because he considered it something strictly private and perhaps, how shall I say, treacherous or elusive."

"La literatura es un vasto bosque y las obras maestras son los lagos, los árboles inmensos o extrañísimos, las elocuentes flores preciosas o las escondidas grutas, pero un bosque también está compuesto por árboles comunes y corrientes, por yerbazales, por charcos, por plantas parásitas, por hongos y por florecillas silvestres."

"I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. ... I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles..."

"That night when he went back to his hotel, he wept for his dead children and all the other castrated boys, for his own lost youth, for those who were young no longer and those who died young, for those who fought for Salvador Allende and those who were too scared to fight."

"One day I heard that The Eye had left Mexico. I wasn't surprised that he hadn't said good-bye. The Eye never said good-bye to anyone. I never said good-bye to anyone either."

"It's strange how things happen, Mauricio Silva, known as the Eye, always tried to escape from violence even at the risk of being considered a coward, but the violence, the real violence, can't be escaped, at least not by us, born in Latin America in the 1950s, those of us who were around twenty years old when Salvador Allende died."

"We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain."

"The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie."

"Literature was a vast minefield occupied by enemies, except for a few classic authors (just a few), and every day I had to walk through that minefield, where any false move could be fatal, with only the poems of Archilochus to guide me. It's like that for all young writers. There comes a time when you have no support, not even from friends, forget about mentors, and there's no one to give you a hand; publication, prizes, and grants are reserved for the others, the ones who said “Yes, sir,” over and over, or those who praised the literary mandarins, a never-ending horde distinguished only by their aptitude for discipline and punishment — nothing escapes them and they forgive nothing."

"If I were to say what I really think I would be arrested or shut away in a lunatic asylum. Come on, I am sure that it would be the same for everyone."

"¿Cómo reconocer una obra de arte? ¿Cómo separarla, aunque sólo sea un momento, de su aparato crítico, de sus exégetas, de sus incansables plagiarios, de sus ninguneadores, de su final destino de soledad? Es fácil. Hay que traducirla."

"Those in power (even if it's only for a little while) known nothing about literature, all they care about is power. And I'll play the fool for my readers, if I feel like it, but never for the powerful."

"Neruda adored life. He was wild about everything - painting, art in general, books, rare editions, food, drink. Eating and drinking were almost a mystical experience for him. A wonderfully likeable man, full of vitality-if you forget his poems in praise of Stalin, of course. He lived in a near-feudal world, where everything led to his rejoicing, his sweet-toothed exuberance for life. I had the good fortune to spend a weekend on Isla Negra. It was wonderful! A kind of social machinery worked around him: hordes of people who cooked and worked-and always quantities of guests. It was a very funny society, extraordinarily alive, without the slightest trace of intellectualism. Neruda was exactly the opposite of Borges, the man who appeared never to drink, smoke, or eat, who one would have said had never made love, for whom all these things seemed completely secondary, and if he had done them it was out of politeness and nothing more. That's because ideas, reading, reflection, and creation were his life, the purely cerebral life. Neruda comes out of the Jorge Amado and Rafael Alberti tradition that says literature is generated by a sensual experience of life."