©2003
Liliana Heer
Blind Date
Prologue
and poem selection by Liliana
Heer
and Ana Arzoumanian
Translated from Spanish by Michael
Smith
The map of Argentinian poetry of the last
decades,
presented in this version on line, has now been changed from the
earlier Written Word Re-cited by
the addition of
other writers. A device beyond national markings allows us to translate
Argentinian poets into a language located on the dissolute margins of
the
frontiers of language. A forthright language that traverses levels of
consistency
in which there is neither past nor future.
The notion of “local” has
been transformed in “speed”,
a concept that implies the rupture of a narrative truss like the
construction
of variables of diverse intensity in the borders of a style. As opposed
to chronology,
the time of poetic pulsations – beyond the regular and the
periodical – imposes
a gradient of acceleration that involves rhythmic displacements,
redefines
concepts of beauty and introduces new polyphonies. Breaking the
authoritarianism of certified postures distorts the category of
property. The
legitimate becomes questionable; every fragmentary expansion
appropriates the
script.
The place of poetry as a practice of language exists in the utopian gesture of the poet whose semantic, syntactic and lexical space is a place full of feelings in constant circulation.
‘when I say delirium I say Rimbaud
when I say lucidity I say Rimbaud
………….
Glory and grief live in these subterranean mazes
One-way out burns in the distance
Sometimes my eyes fade
and sometimes the light blinds me’
Mario Trejo (‘La lucha
personal’, Personal Struggle)
Lost from the beginning, without distinction of
entry
or exit, without return to any origin, beyond any ingenuity, silence
and name
are flàneurs.
‘If I stay long enough
I shall see the fisherman returning with his
lamp,
if I stay long enough
and do not vanish in a hotel room
like a scared crab.’
(Paulina Vinderman, ‘Simbad en la
taza’, Simbad in the
cup)
The poetic process does not consist in reducing
the
object, whatever happens as an event is alien to its representation, it
exceeds, rushes, appears when it is named.
‘orchids gardenias
they’ll run a shoeless race
under the foreign sky
they’ll laugh
at their being banned
from the final scene
of an all-inclusive paradise’
(Jorge Paloantonio,
‘Paraíso levemente perdido’,
Paradise slightly lost)
When the poet writes extension, the risk of
touching –
a nucleus of incessant fright – he prefixes the indiscernible
of meaning. The
inner side of what cannot be said is extracted: raw, not yet corporal,
a
preamble of some immunity.
‘My heart
is a shapeless mass
bleeding
obvious
and on top of everything red
surly muscle
and
nauseating
without a bird’s vocation’
(Reynaldo Sietecase, ‘En
fin’, “At last”)
It is Achilles’ lance that heals
wounds. They are the
letters that bring the stamp of Sovereignty with commands of
confinement or
exile. Threat, scandal, lines of destruction, disorder.
‘The beard soaked between the legs of
your savagery
shy
more audacious, or what more
like the chemical properties of your juices
and the cold metal of our swords.’
(Alejandro Pidello, ‘La Cour des
Voraces’)
Making of the immeasurable a condition, a
design: hybris in progress.
Overcome the political
cartography that divides countries, latitudes, surfaces. Set up a way out of the
battle between the
singular and the plural.
‘crossing
months and years and seasons
deserts
of ice stone or sand
with a steady step
as undaunted
by change
of the temperature of light
to the harshness
of landscape
to acquire
the consistence of stone
of insects
or pachyderms
their elegance
recondite and mysterious…’
(Anahí Mallol, -9-)
A buzzing, the purring, the depth of the
tongueless
mouth. Air entering and exiting the sonorous cavity. Cavern, drum with
its top
of animal hide extremely taut. It is music, sound of absence.
‘gives me
a white
flower
that does not smell
I leave it
in the shade
of the water
of the vase’
(Susana Szwarc, ‘Vano’,
Vain)
Place and senses dismembered, violence
cauterized by
fire invades. The One open, undefined. Solitude is not a theme, it is
the image
itself and its expression.
‘…will the substance of so
many suspended bodies leave
through this luminous hole? the body mangled, is that substance mangled
too or
are remnants left behind like lovers who seek each other after some
catastrophe?...’
(Lila Zemborain, ‘11 de marzo 2002,
de noche’, march
11 2002 (at night))
The rests, the ruins, the spoils of an eclipsed
civilization pass at our side; a nature grimacing in a gentle,
indefinite
sketch. If the moral vehicle is transformed into the artistic, then the
landscape is a gesture of itself.
‘So I tear up my notes,
deactivate the explosion,
and leave everything in place
while I continue my journey
satisfied to have left the world untouched,
a place no foot had ever trod.’
(Santiago Sylvester, ‘Libro de
viaje’, Travel Book)
Ode to finite, not unlimited surface. Writing
without
interposed voice, without footnotes. There is a unique message and
neither the
earth nor wretchedness are capable of wrapping it up, the ambience and
the
context in permanent wandering.
‘He dreams of sacred objects, of
sexual devices, of
stones made damp by treachery, of the beginning of all
deformation.’
(Mario Sampaolesi, ‘2’)
Precise, up to a certain uncontrollable point,
a
furtive manner of discovering all the swayings of the scene, including
the
damaged. The drama is unbound like detention. Voices observe the past
devoid of
epic.
‘the history of who
from his ruinous confinement
devoted to the pleasant vice of words
finally
awaits
eager
stripped
undone
with so many things to say.’
(Basilia Papastamatiu, ‘2’)
The poems of this endless Supplement shape a
shadow
where a certain hope of civic transmission ambushes: to inform
something of the
language of Argentinians. We would not simply like to distinguish the
harmony
of the unreconciled; this is the same as saying: it is the work that a
language
makes. In the resonance of the words, subjects and forms disappear to
be
converted into immediate actors.
BLIND DATE – SELECTED POETS
Authors included:
Mario Trejo
Version with selected poems
Related
Antología de poesía argentina (I)
This prologue and the bilingual version of the selected poems have been published in Free Verse Website 2009, as an extension of the First Anthology of Argentinian poetry – published in Poetry Ireland Review, Nº 73, Summer 2002, edited by Michael Smith.
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© Liliana Heer and Ana Arzoumanian
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