Translated from the Spanish by Erín Moure
Translator’s Note:
The notes are the translator’s, made to let counter-noises run in, through and against the translated texts, troubling them as colonialism has troubled Chile, Ajens’ country. The work of Ajens embeds many counter-narratives and names that act as Southern resistances from within his text. In English, a translator can’t reconvey quite those same reverberations without turning them into explanations or footnotes of a Chilean culture and history of dominations that still seem “distant” to our North. Explanations can’t really account here. So rather than patiently explaining the ingressions and transgressions of the text (and his hemisphere) to northern readers (as Ajens did to me, his North-American reader), I created the note texts. They are traitorous notes. And thus, I believe, honest.
i. ore-bearing erranttextile, hydrofiliate. a silence will have yet been spoken prior to the saying, its time, language and its metaphors, the ghastly potions, the wondrous ones, the neutral, one silence intercalated / between one, ibid and none, away past- or pre- its mission to obsequence, the celebration terribly, offering of an archangel anchored or malediction, diction with descendents, prior yet to that silence and prior to prior, meaning its image, ideya, and deposit – wandering textile, interwoven, lunation to lunation, of tough rope or interjecture and lunacy pre- natal (cleavage and/or // yeow womb of i-ambs).
Or in my arms. Trying not to fly out in space or water. The silence that is most assertably my mother tongue. Ore and oar. Then learning English. Space trepidly expandable. To mouth “unison” (ouch).
whistle- (wiwacawín) -kawiñ suppose you head to a south pacific island suppose some islander comes up and asks what’s hup-hup with all this / suppose together with tout contre on est deux you all contemplate the anthropophagous navel of the world cutting the umbilical cord they suppose the island drowns one moonless night they suppose the word-island can’t swim nor the word drown nor the word suppose the word moon’s exploded on a sidereal rockface your situation is unsure; your air, truly insular, is the coast getting nearer? might it slip over, sibilant, the sill?
Further than the far south, the island to the south of such a line, situates us. Somehow all Chileans (therefore: all of us) are descended from the line drawn south of this line.... And sibilance is “whistling” here. But it’s fake insouciance... (sibilant=>shibboleth?)
allographic daffodils (allegory). what’s inconsumable in the a-diction to foreigners’ languages, their háphazard heccéity: captaincies, graphotropical insularities, amazonical paths. unmedusing the diction of muses. zest-sparked compasses, insubmissive graphological palms (estrus-ogical)
Albeit, a question of the translator here. My translation of the poet’s language into mine: haphazard indeed. But note: the graphic, finally, is carried away by the heat of the moment. And what is “of moment” is “what counts.”
Agramont, mountbitter Muster this mountain, this mount stream outpour of vocables and vocables, yes syl lables and syllables, in El Alto, dispelled: converse beyond the r(each) of syllabary. Mum’s the word. In mit’air the mit’a spinclambers, wades in, disintrrupts, Illimani, Illampu and lagniappe. Κόμμα in quotemarks? Sasaw si* – Aargh. samay pata.**
*As was said. **Rest on high.
ay. qu.
Andrés Ajens is an Andean-Chilean writer, author of fifteen books of poetry, hybrid criticism-poetry, and translation. Recent titles are La guaCa húmera (2022) and La golondrina húmera y otros poemas de Paul Celan (2022). He lives in Santiago de Chile, where he coordinates the poetry magazine Mar con soroche (Santiago/La Paz) and teaches Andean literature at the University of Chile. A selection of his poems, So-Lair Storm, will appear in English translation by Erín Moure from Black Sun Lit in 2024.
Erín Moure is a poet and translator based in Montreal. She has published 18 books of poetry, essays, articles on translation, and two memoirs, and is translator or co-translator of 26 books, from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian into English, and Galician into French. Most recent translations: Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (2021) and Chantal Neveu’s This Radiant Life (2020). Theophylline: ana-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké, is upcoming in 2023 from House of Anansi Press in Toronto.
World Poetry Review 