Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from Latin America

Raúl Zurita, Forrest Gander, ed.

This intensely focused bilingual anthology pinpoints the heart of Latin American self-identification. In selecting these fifteen essential poems, Chilean poet Raúl Zurita was guided by the question, “What poem, had it not been written, would have rendered the author and Latin American poetry something else?” This extraordinary gathering of talent—from Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda to Ernesto Cardenal and César Vallejo—spans the twentieth century.

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ISBN: 9781556594502

Format: Paperback

The Fugue

Gabriela Mistral (Chile, 1889–1957)

 

Mother, in the dream

I walk through bruised landscapes:

a black mountain that bends on

toward the other mountain; and I

can barely see you on the one

that follows, but there’s always another

mountain to round, to pay the price

to the mountain of our joy.

 

But now and then you yourself

walk the path of games and ruin.

We go on close, continue aware,

but we can’t look into each other’s eyes,

and we can’t talk,

like Orpheus alone and Eurydice alone,

each living out a promise or penance,

with broken accent and feet.

 

Sometimes you’re not beside me:

you’re in me, in a weight as anguished

as it is loving, like some poor galley-

slave son to his galley-slave father,

and we’ve got to weave through the hills,

without speaking the painful secret:

that I’ve stolen you from cruel gods

and that we go to a God of our own.

 

And other times you’re not ahead,

or with me, or in my breath:

you’ve receded into the hills’ mist,

you’ve given in to the bruised landscape.

And out of nowhere your voice

is sarcastic with me, and I break down

because my one body is the one you gave me,

and you’re now water of a hundred eyes,

you’re a landscape of a thousands arms,

that won’t ever again be what lovers are:

living chest on living chest,

bronze knot eased in sobs.

 

And we’re never there, we never stay,

like they say the glorious end up,

in front of their God, in two rings

of light, or two enraptured medallions,

skewered into a ray of glory

or lying flat in a golden riverbed.

 

Or I look for you, and you don’t know,

or you’re with me, and I can’t see your face;

or you’re in me because of an awful pact,

but don’t answer with your deaf body,

always by those rosary hills,

that draw blood to grant joy,

and make us dance around each one,

until that moment your head’s on fire,

the rattle of old dementia,

and snaring in the red vortex!

About the Author

Raúl Zurita, winner of the Chilean National Poetry Prize, is one of the most vital voices in contemporary Latin American literature. Coming out of the Chilean avant-garde (and, through his grandmother, out of the Italian tradition for poetic sequences), Zurita’s work is nevertheless incredibly intimate and often shocking in its emotional immediacy and clarity. He is the creator of massive landscape poems bulldozed into the Atacama Desert and poems skywritten over New York. Arrested and tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship, …

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About the Editor

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. He is a writer and translator with degrees in geology and English literature. Among his recent books are Be With, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, and Core Samples from the World, a Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. His translations include Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda; Fungus Skull Eye Wing: Selected Poems of Alfonso D’Aquino; and Pinholes in the Night: Essential Poems from …

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Reviews

“[A] well-defined, important primer on Latin American poetics.” —Booklist