WEBVTT

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And then I'm going to read a
few pieces from another book I

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translated called Valdivia by
a younger Chilean writer named

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Galo Ghigliotto.

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Valdivia is the name of a town
in Southern Chile where there's

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a kind of coming-of-age
story that

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happens throughout the poem
where there's a narrator who,

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with his mother, is kind of
fleeing an abusive father.

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Valdivia is known for
raining all of the time

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and having the worst
earthquake to ever hit

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the world in, I think, 1960.

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So this is also a book-length
poem divided into many parts.

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And I'm going to just jump
right in towards the end

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and read a few of them.

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"My mother roams the
streets of Valdivia.

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She's naked and wet.

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No one sees her except
a man running scared

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to hide in his house.

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My mother looks for me
in the night and screams.

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Many will believe she
is looking for my father

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because they don't know.

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They will invent
stories because they

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don't know we have all
died before we were born,

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and our bodies are the
illusion of beings who

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live only beneath the river.

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34.

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Hey, father, I didn't
know you were so inclined

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to be devoured by spirits.

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In any case, I
couldn't do anything.

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I didn't know your skin was
made of scales so soluble

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on split tongues.

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Hey, father, which
confessional hid the trap?

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My eyes were barely
gonads, but I could see.

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And I can still
see that your hands

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are too big for your
trade and your head

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too small for the bottles you
squeezed between your fingers.

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Hey, father, why
did you abandon us?

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There is no antidote against
the pustules of rage,

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and you let yourself be
carried away by the current.

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You let yourself go, father,
because our house was never

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enough for you to
quell your hunger.

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You had to become a debt.

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Just because the
book was written

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didn't mean you
had to follow it.

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Hey, father, you didn't
need to be a slave.

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If your arms were
strong, we could have

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changed the river's course.

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And these trees
you saw around you

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got tired of waiting
for your arrival.

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Your axe sleeps the sleep
of the thousand evocations

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in the long night in which
you wrote my nightmares.

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Hey, father, how many
houses do you live in?

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To how many corners do
you carry the thirst

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hanging from your neck?

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How many times did you hit me?

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How many times did
you kill my mother?

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It's so easy to let yourself
be carried away by the current.

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The dead don't get in the way.

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They're the best
travel companions.

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Hey, father, the countryside
made you from my own blood,

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but you weren't big enough to
irrigate yourself with mine.

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We died a while ago.

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I'm still hanging
from the fig tree,

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and they assure me
your footsteps still

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rattle the floor planks of this
enormous house called Valdivia,

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of all the houses big and
small named the same as all

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the families of the world.

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Look here.

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This is what you put in my
hand, a gold crucifix that's

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way too heavy.

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And I don't want it.

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My Christ dances and sings
somewhere in paradise.

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This cross belongs to
you and to the spirit

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who helps you bear it.

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Hey, father, don't you see?

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I don't want to swell
the ranks ever again.

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I hope that when I
die again, it will

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be at war, that it will
be for love, that it will

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be for vengeance, but [? not ?]
hanging from the fig tree you

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never cut because you
were too anesthetized,

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busy hunting down
brothels in the village.

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Hey, father, we ghosts
are very far away.

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And to wait for autumn
to come each year

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is too long to send the
letters I never dared write you

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in the double task of
writing yours and mine

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while the demons licked your
bones, making them reverberate

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with the sound of violins.

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And we decomposed orchestrally,
each in our own painful plot

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of land.

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Hey, father, you
were so blind when

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you were alive and even
worse when you had just died,

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so deaf because I would scream.

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And I would scream at your
dogs that it wasn't me,

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that it was the moon
that had wounded you.

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And the ghostly dogs
roamed through my dreams,

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fighting the air.

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And the air hurt me because
I was dead, sublimated.

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My jaws hurt as
they came out of me.

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I, too, am a wolf, wounded
by the moon's blade.

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And the profusions of my
blood are sliced-up faces,

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smiles opened with a knife.

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The profusion of
my wound is a wolf

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transfigured by death into a
line perpendicular to time.

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And the cross it forms
buries itself in my breast,

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dividing me in four, chopping
me up to feed the flames.

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Hey, father, let's
let the fables begin.

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Let's leave them to
their work in the shadows

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of the fig tree we never cut.

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There will be
buildings here someday,

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entire families hanging
from tree branches.

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And we will go on living,
seeing how you left us,

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father, left with our eyes
awake, submerged in a hole

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where everything has
died, where everything

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has died but our misery.

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35.

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My mother is a widow
submerged in the river at 3:00

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in the morning, and she
carries me in her arms.

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We are running away,
searching for my father.

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The current carried him away.

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And we wait at the bottom
for someone to rescue us,

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to leave us at a street
corner, to disappear and turn

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into another fable from
the city of Valdivia.

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But everything is true.

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Somewhere, everything is true
in this imaginary world."

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