Juan Gelman and Roberto Bolaño: Against Dictadurar

I am trying not to write a “love letter” to Juan Gelman and instead to address the historical and literary value in his work as well as how it breaks form and how language breaks as this is the official theme of this unit in the syllabus.

As someone who was born outside of the U.S. in a region of Mexico still lacking such basic infrastructure as plumbing (I grew up using latrines for example) and whose inhabitants have further been displaced by the signing of NAFTA (the 1994 free-trade agreement between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico and that led to the armed-uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas), it is not easy for me to convey the monstrous inequalities that have led writers like Gelman and Bolaño to struggle and support and sometimes even participate in many of the revolutionary and also democratic movements of Latin America. The people in this region that I grew-up in were primarily corn farmers who after the signing of NAFTA could not grow a crop that could compete with the vast subsidies of U.S. grown-corn, in many parts of Mexico the local corn is more expansive than the U.S.-imported corn due to the lack of trade tariffs and as a result many of these people have been displaced to the U.S. including myself, in essence we are economic-refugees. This is the world that I come from, that Gelman and Bolaño too come from. Gelman and Bolaño were political refugees, uprooted from Argentina and Chile respectively because of the U.S.-backed military-dictatorships that overthrew those democratically-elected governments.

In fact the history of U.S.-Latin American relations is deeply troubling, a repetitive story of direct support or participation in interventions and coups throughout the continent, the most recent for example: the overthrow of Haiti’s Aristide and the failed attempts to overthrow the populists and left-leaning presidents of Venzuela—Hugo Chavez—and Evo Morales of Bolivia during the Bush presidency. During the Obama presidency so far the U.S. gave support to the coup that successfully overthrow Manuel Zelaya of Honduras in 2009.

I bring up this history only because it is crucial to understanding both Gelman and Bolaño. how else can we interpret Gelman’s involvement with the Montoneros—an urban guerrilla movement that sought to overthrow the dictatorship—or Bolaños exile in Mexico and his relationship to Chile and the coup as it is retold in “dancecard”? Ironically, despite this troubling history, the U.S. remains a place that is intimately connected with literary movements of Latin America. In my opinion, for example there is no bigger figure in Latin American poetry than that of Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman’s most prodigious son. Spanish, of course, is one of the great international languages, with more than 500 million speakers in the world. But today, with almost 40 million speakers, the United States not only counts Spanish as by far the second most spoken language, it also has the second-largest Spanish speaking population in the world. For us writing in English, what might the sensibility held in Gelman and Bolaño yield in our poetry, or, as some might say: the poetry of the Americas?

I am having a hard time bringing myself to speak of Gelman’s poetry. And precisely because I do not have the beautiful words by which to make justice to it I will quote from Cortazar which you read in the packet: “He is a man whose family has been severed from him [both his son and daughter-in-law were tortured and disappeared; his granddaughter given away to a military family; he has lived in exile in Mexico City ever since and has never gone back to Argentina; similar to Bolaño]yet nobody has been able to kill in Juan the will to subvert the sum of his horror into an affirmative counter strike, a creator of new life. Perhaps the most admirable element of his poetry is the unthinkable tenderness he shows where paroxysm of rejection and denouncement would be justified, or his calling upon so many shadows for one voice to lull and comfort, a permanent caress of words on unknown tombs.”

And indeed I think the power in the poetry of Gelman is its providing of a counterstrike that is greater than the sorrow that caused it, it one deeply grounded in love and tenderness and which recognizes everything that existed (think of the testimony of the “tree” that is turned into a table in the poem by the same title and that is forced to be participant in the tortures or of the images of flight and flying; “swallows,” flying deaths, nightingales, which are attempts to reclaim the metaphor and symbols of flight from the “death-flights” that were occurring throughout the country—people being dropped/disappeared from helicopters in the middle of the ocean) and that is against the mad logic of violence, of political repression.

His poetry is one that employs the word as a material that explores the truths of the Latin American reality (such as his creation of the word “dictadurar” which means both dictatorship and to endure) and which attempts to rescue and preserve that reality as if to prevent it from falling into oblivion, and that can engage and politicize.

 The socio-political context in which Gelman begins his literary career is in the context of the presence of American imperialist interests and interventions in Latin America. And more importantly, of the nascent realization—through the Cuban Revolution of the early 1960’s—that imperialist domination was not necessarily everlasting; that the apparent inexpugnability of the powerful was not without its crevices, and that an entire peoples’ creative will could overthrow those cold architects of destruction. His poetry is thus one that successfully marries the socio-political consciousness of the author to the creative and aesthetic consciousness of the language. His poetry is never one that sought to translate manifestos or political discourses into a “poetic language” or form but rather one that simply asked of poetry to speak of that which is political, the political not simply as thematic but as something that unfolds or takes place within the creative geography of a poem.

And since this a post on form and how language breaks form I think I should address what all of you can tell by now is the defining characteristic of Gelman’s poetry: the rhetorical question and the slash “/”. The question, for me, has the same value as that of an affirmation that brings into question the force behind what the verse has or is revealing. The question has both a poetic effect but also a political one, as if to ask:

Can poetry be created even in the midst or after particular horrors?

The “/” on the other hand—I think; IDK really except that i stole it—has a rhythmic connotation.  It also fractures the verse however the poet seems fit or for whatever desired effect.   It is also I think as if the poet is saying there is not much to say about this or that horrow but rather there are many possibilities to say that there is not much to say about the horrors. Does that make sense? What do you make of the rhetorical question and the slash? (Please don’t embarrass me, I know I stole all my poetry from Gelman).

Finally how do you relate Bolaño’s dancecard which although it is a short story, it is very much autobiographical and his Lalo Cura story [Lalo Cura= La Locura which in Spanish means “The Madness”] to Gelman’s poetry and the history of Latin America? For the “prefiguration of lalo cura” runs in a similar vein as Gelman’s poetry in that it unmasks the truths of the Latin American condition without falling into the trap of being enamored with revolutionary struggles that many of the writers of “the Boom” generation were.

I know I barely touched on the aspects of translation but here are some poems as read by Gelman, in case you are interested, in listening and speaking to this aspect of the work:

"Cherries/ Cerezas:"

"On Poetry/ Sobre la Poesia:"