And then I'm going to read a few pieces from another book I
translated called Valdivia by a younger Chilean writer named
Galo Ghigliotto.
Valdivia is the name of a town in Southern Chile where there's
a kind of coming-of-age story that
happens throughout the poem where there's a narrator who,
with his mother, is kind of fleeing an abusive father.
Valdivia is known for raining all of the time
and having the worst earthquake to ever hit
the world in, I think, 1960.
So this is also a book-length poem divided into many parts.
And I'm going to just jump right in towards the end
and read a few of them.
"My mother roams the streets of Valdivia.
She's naked and wet.
No one sees her except a man running scared
to hide in his house.
My mother looks for me in the night and screams.
Many will believe she is looking for my father
because they don't know.
They will invent stories because they
don't know we have all died before we were born,
and our bodies are the illusion of beings who
live only beneath the river.
34.
Hey, father, I didn't know you were so inclined
to be devoured by spirits.
In any case, I couldn't do anything.
I didn't know your skin was made of scales so soluble
on split tongues.
Hey, father, which confessional hid the trap?
My eyes were barely gonads, but I could see.
And I can still see that your hands
are too big for your trade and your head
too small for the bottles you squeezed between your fingers.
Hey, father, why did you abandon us?
There is no antidote against the pustules of rage,
and you let yourself be carried away by the current.
You let yourself go, father, because our house was never
enough for you to quell your hunger.
You had to become a debt.
Just because the book was written
didn't mean you had to follow it.
Hey, father, you didn't need to be a slave.
If your arms were strong, we could have
changed the river's course.
And these trees you saw around you
got tired of waiting for your arrival.
Your axe sleeps the sleep of the thousand evocations
in the long night in which you wrote my nightmares.
Hey, father, how many houses do you live in?
To how many corners do you carry the thirst
hanging from your neck?
How many times did you hit me?
How many times did you kill my mother?
It's so easy to let yourself be carried away by the current.
The dead don't get in the way.
They're the best travel companions.
Hey, father, the countryside made you from my own blood,
but you weren't big enough to irrigate yourself with mine.
We died a while ago.
I'm still hanging from the fig tree,
and they assure me your footsteps still
rattle the floor planks of this enormous house called Valdivia,
of all the houses big and small named the same as all
the families of the world.
Look here.
This is what you put in my hand, a gold crucifix that's
way too heavy.
And I don't want it.
My Christ dances and sings somewhere in paradise.
This cross belongs to you and to the spirit
who helps you bear it.
Hey, father, don't you see?
I don't want to swell the ranks ever again.
I hope that when I die again, it will
be at war, that it will be for love, that it will
be for vengeance, but [? not ?] hanging from the fig tree you
never cut because you were too anesthetized,
busy hunting down brothels in the village.
Hey, father, we ghosts are very far away.
And to wait for autumn to come each year
is too long to send the letters I never dared write you
in the double task of writing yours and mine
while the demons licked your bones, making them reverberate
with the sound of violins.
And we decomposed orchestrally, each in our own painful plot
of land.
Hey, father, you were so blind when
you were alive and even worse when you had just died,
so deaf because I would scream.
And I would scream at your dogs that it wasn't me,
that it was the moon that had wounded you.
And the ghostly dogs roamed through my dreams,
fighting the air.
And the air hurt me because I was dead, sublimated.
My jaws hurt as they came out of me.
I, too, am a wolf, wounded by the moon's blade.
And the profusions of my blood are sliced-up faces,
smiles opened with a knife.
The profusion of my wound is a wolf
transfigured by death into a line perpendicular to time.
And the cross it forms buries itself in my breast,
dividing me in four, chopping me up to feed the flames.
Hey, father, let's let the fables begin.
Let's leave them to their work in the shadows
of the fig tree we never cut.
There will be buildings here someday,
entire families hanging from tree branches.
And we will go on living, seeing how you left us,
father, left with our eyes awake, submerged in a hole
where everything has died, where everything
has died but our misery.
35.
My mother is a widow submerged in the river at 3:00
in the morning, and she carries me in her arms.
We are running away, searching for my father.
The current carried him away.
And we wait at the bottom for someone to rescue us,
to leave us at a street corner, to disappear and turn
into another fable from the city of Valdivia.
But everything is true.
Somewhere, everything is true in this imaginary world."