Translated by Daniel Shapiro
Daniel Shapiro is Editor of Review. His latest publications are the poetry collection Child with a Swan’s Wings (2018), and two translations—Missing Persons, Animals, and Artists, by Roberto Ransom (2018), and Kokoro: A Mexican Woman in Japan (2018), by Araceli Tinajero.
Twenty-five years have gone by since the last time that Review dedicated a special issue to Chilean literature. It was number 49, published in 1994. The title of that issue was “Visions from Within.” Chile had recovered its democracy in 1990, after a cruel dictatorship that lasted sixteen years. At that time, there was interest abroad in learning about Chilean culture that had emerged in “internal exile.” There was also curiosity about the new writing that was appearing with such force in those first years of recovered freedom.
A quarter of a century later, Review returns to Chile to take up “Contemporary Chilean Writing.” This title points out that our narrative writing and poetry have left behind that exceptional state of twenty-five years earlier. Now, instead of a term that suggests confinement (“within”), Chilean literature can be described by using the word “contemporary.” Today our literature is contemporary because we are no longer “exceptional”; our times are, for good or bad, the same as in the rest of the world.
Since the beginning of the nineties, Chile has opened up and joined the current cultural, economic, and political globalization. If at the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, 40% of our population was living in poverty, now, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, that number has decreased to 10%. Millions of people constitute a new middle class devoted to the mass consumption of goods and services. In the same period, Chile’s steady growth earned it the highest per capita income in Latin America and the country’s improved social welfare helped it achieve the highest rates of health and education in the region. This economic and social development attracted hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Today, Chile has the highest proportion of foreign residents (6.6% in 2018) in all of Latin America.
No progress is without a cost nor is that progress ever enough. Our accelerated prosperity has demanded great effort and some of its consequences have been traumatic. Chilean society faces pressures from increased inequalities and unprecedented challenges. The new freedoms have brought new insecurities. Once obtained, the benefits most desired reveal their imperfections. The emerging middle class, still precarious and in debt, demands that its material conquests be guaranteed and requests more rights and more political participation. Like everywhere else, social media turns the majority of people into activists or at least into polemicists. Marginalized groups and minorities, previously almost invisible, become “empowered” and voice their mostly justified or, at times, exaggerated demands. Those petitions inscribe themselves into the panorama of a changing society, entranced by an overall gentrification that—to paraphrase Marx—dissolves everything solid into air and profanes everything that was sacred.
Together with the inescapable memory of the dictatorship and its abuses, our literature reflects the new variety of themes that mirror us with other contemporary societies. Feminism, the rights of sexual minorities, indigenous peoples’ claims, ecology, migration, and the impact of new technologies have surfaced in poetry and narrative writing.
But sociological readings are only partial ways of understanding a literature. As with all literature, Chilean narrative and poetry do not only conduct a dialogue with their society, but also with themselves and with their local and foreign traditions as well. That dialogue with tradition also manifests itself in variations of style. At times these stylistic innovations are really rediscoveries. Both elements appear in the poems and narrative selections compiled in this issue.
Poetry
The selection of contemporary poetry collected in this issue confirms the progression of continuities and ruptures that have boosted this genre in Chile.
The poems of Óscar Hahn (1938), anthologized here, are fantastic and visionary. Three of them imagine invasions; the world is taken over by “others.” The marvelous verses of “The Communicating Mirrors” can be read as a realization of the myth of the double or, from their imagery, as an ominous prophecy about the destiny of our society: “‘All these reflections of persons / and animals will emerge from mirrors / to invade towns and cities // […] no one will be able to tell the difference / […] between / … human beings and their living pictures / names and things // This will mark the end of the world.’”
Some of the poems by Manuel Silva Acevedo (1942) flow with a kind of Biblical zest. Other poems launch social critiques, peppered with Parra-esque humor: “On the sidewalk I sleep like a log. / A newspaper serves as my quilt—how snug / if I fall down dead on the street / statistics cover the wrong like a sheet.” (“Homeless”).
Maria Inés Zaldívar (1953) extracts transcendence from everyday details: a microwave oven warms up the poet’s memory (“Microwave”); the dull thud of oranges falling on the floor reminds her of shovelfuls of earth falling onto a coffin (“Oranges in the Night”). In another poem, Zaldívar imagines a feminist Telemacha: a sister of Telemachus who doesn’t want to be like her mother but instead desires to embark on adventures like her brother and father.
Leonel Lienlaf (1969) writes in Mapudungun. In one of his poems, he asserts that a horse’s gallop appears to say: “Lautaro-Lautaro” (“Lauxaro”). In other poems, the lyric speaker walks along a hill that is at the same time a tale: “in the middle of zigzag stories I drag myself / and I cannot figure out these chanted paths” (“Wvyilen”). In Lienlaf’s poetry, nature wants to speak to the poet in his native language, but at times that language hides and threatens to become lost. The poet sings so that his language won’t be lost.
There are correspondences and affinities between the poems of Gloria Dünkler Valencia (1977) and those of Leonel Lienlaf. He writes in Mapudungun. She writes in Spanish but titles her poems in German, the language of some of her ancestors, settlers in Araucanía. Dünkler celebrates mestizaje. “An Indian woman watches a settler sow his garden / and the dance of muscles pushing the yoke / makes her shudder from dawn to dusk.” The poet traces her origins in that shuddering.
In one of his poems, Marcelo Rioseco (1967) argues with Roberto Bolaño about whether poetry is or isn’t “a form of courage.” In another of his poems, Rioseco reviews the old tension between domestic life and poetry and expands it to the notion of a domestic country: “My country, like a great wasteland” (“Mi país”). From these poems we could deduce a dialectical synthesis: poetry is a form of courage in our domestic literature.
Juan Cristóbal Romero (1974) plumbs the very source of our poetry: “I yearned for glory’s praise, but only reaped / life’s nothingness, vile scorn and even shame” (“Ercilla”). Romero’s poems converse with the ancient classics (“Séneca”), or challenge the most recent classics. “Dos extraños” (“Two Strangers”) is a sonnet of Borgesian lineage: “I seek some memory, recessed in that gleam / of my first youth, that might leave reconciled, / by shortening the space between, that child / I was and this mere copy I now seem.” Romero is not alone in this neoclassicism which is the most singular phenomenon in recent Chilean poetry.
The youngest poet in this anthology, Úrsula Starke (1983), sounds at times like a Gothic Gabriela Mistral. Her poetry demonstrates traces of Symbolism, gloomy Modernismo, tormented and anxious Romanticism. Starke also is capable of infusing mystical poetry with a political message: “I ached at the reflection of another race that filled my head with silenced imaginaries, with sentences that should not have been repeated” (“Second Ecstasy of Saint Rose …”).
Academic and poet Felipe Cussen complements this anthology with an essay that deals with experimental Chilean poetry. Cussen reviews the 3rd Festival of Poetry and Music celebrated in September 2018, analyzing the different ways that poetry emphasizes its resonant materiality in Chile. Numerous young poets experiment with overflowing words and their meanings in order to penetrate the territories of sound, thus contemporizing the traditional bond between poetry and music.
Fiction
The nine fiction writers presented in these pages are as diverse as the poets anthologized here.
Jorge Edwards (1931) narrates a crucial episode in Pablo Neruda’s youth: when the poet of twenty-three years was Consul in Rangoon, he fled without warning from a Burmese woman whom he loved and feared. That love and that flight inspired “Widower’s Tango,” one of Neruda’s best-known poems: “How much of the darkness in my soul I would give to get you back[.]” Edwards confirms his novelistic mastery, painting with only a few strokes settings and atmospheres, reasons and daydreams. Edwards’s style maintains the poetic inspiration that has impregnated the best Chilean narrative writing.
“Shouts in the Street,” from the novel Fuerzas especiales (Special Forces), by Diamela Eltit (1949), intercepts the narrator’s verbal wandering. It’s Saturday and the police have withdrawn from a ghetto where rival gangs confront each other. Just like the bullets in the barrio, the names of obsolete or super-sophisticated weapons riddle the text. Words are elusive, slipping away from their literal imprisoned meanings to free association: “[…] get ourselves high on pisco looking upwards [….] An approach that augurs unprecedented prosperity for us.” The narrator dreams of imposing “my style, with the kids’ weeping, the window guards, and the bold sound of the bullets. I understand music.” The music that blasts on a Saturday night in the poorest Latin American suburbs: “Laughter, tears, and bullets.”
Real hunger in the town of Eltit’s story is mock hunger in the upper-class school portrayed in the novel of Arturo Fontaine (1952), Cuando éramos inmortales (When We Were Immortal): “What’s Girardi’s problem, friends? Can you figure it out? I’ll tell you: he’s hungry.” A student thug abuses one of his classmates, sits on him, eats his lunch, and then the abuser forces the other one to eat his boogers. His schoolmates yell “how gross,” but they revel in it. The abused boy smiles stupidly. The abuser suspects the reason why: “He despises us, got that? We’re a bunch of […] little boys, prematurely depraved. He, on the other hand, is an innocent lamb. Thanks to us, of course.”
In a fragment of his novel Muertes paralelas (Parallel Deaths), Sergio Missana (1966) makes us listen to a beggar woman as she’s attacked and burned. But the one who speaks is not the beggar woman herself but the conscience of another character trapped inside her. Missana narrates this complex story with exact prose and perfect control. But his major achievement is the mise en abîme that includes us: the reader also remains trapped inside that alien life.
The style of Alejandra Costamagna (1970) has a pendulum-like rhythm. Her stories move back-and-forth between past and present, between conscience and existence, between appearance and suggestion. The excerpt from the novel anthologized here demonstrates this rhythm. “A novel in reverse: my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, me.” Soon the author/narrator recognizes that all memory is invention and desire: “Perhaps it’s not memory, I think now, that resists being told, but rather something very old inside of me that falls silent.”
The protagonist of Miracle in Haiti, by Rafael Gumucio (1970), is a Chilean woman who is delirious after cosmetic surgery carried out in a private clinic in Haiti. That reality is more delirious than her hallucinations. Carmen Prado only knows that “she is not in her house, or in her country, nor even in her body.” But then where is she? Gumucio reviews the story of a rebellious matriarch whose family biography interweaves that of Chile. The fast-paced prose is also rebellious: the discourses stumble over each other in order to express themselves. The result is a polyphonic and baroque monologue where nostalgia, irony, and humor are all mixed together.
In “Lagoon,” the hallucinatory text of Álvaro Bisama (1975), a voice is heard within another voice within another voice. “One passed down from parents to children. From children to grandchildren. A bedtime story. A horror story.” In the middle of that story the earth trembles. “The animal opened its eyes in the darkness. It moved.” Bisama portrays the origins of twenty-first century Chile, mixing its new legends with his ancestral fears.
There’s a low-intensity sadism in “Wax,” a story by María José Navia (1982). The protagonist, tortured by a memory, avenges herself by making her beauty-salon clients suffer. This woman isn’t capable of sensing her own tragedy and maybe because of that wants her clients to scream for her. Navia’s story succeeds in making howls of repressed pain audible. In Navia’s stories, emotional intensity is underscored—instead of muzzled—by the precision of a controlled and concise language.
Like other authors of her generation, Paulina Flores (1988) portrays the new Chilean middle class that has recently gained access to mass consumption. As a result of too much coddling of them, material ambitions turn into fetishes. The father of the family, the protagonist of the story anthologized here, avoids acknowledging that he’s been fired and his own failure as he watches the new 3-D TV he’s just bought. Flores suggests that the current conspicuous consumption is a drug that allows one to forget the future; the TV screen masks reality.
The essays on Chilean narrative by professors Alfonso de Toro and Will H. Corral complement our anthology of narrative writers. De Toro’s essay focuses on one of my works, set during the dictatorship and the subsequent transition to democracy (The Absent Sea, 2011). Prof. Corral’s essay, in turn, contains a complete review of the contemporary novelistic scene in Chile today, from the New Narrative of the nineties, to the one known as “Children’s Narrative” practiced by some authors who were children during the last stages of the dictatorship.
Afterword
An anthology is also a work of fiction. The map is not identical to the territory. Even the coordinates of this map, of this anthology, demand an act of faith. The borders that separate nationalities and generations are lines as imaginary as the political borders that divide landscapes. Every effort to circumscribe a literature to a determined space and time tends to reduce it. On the other hand, all literature, when it is excellent, seeks universality and timelessness. It could be no other way since the very substance of literature, language, seeks to expand itself and endure.
I compiled this brief anthology of contemporary Chilean literature with these precautions in mind. This compilation is only a guide, partial and provisional, for readers to penetrate—and hopefully to lose themselves in—the imaginary territories of Chile.
A Note on the Selection of Authors and Texts
As with all anthologies, the selection of Chilean narrative writers and poets contained in this issue of Review is necessarily limited. For reasons of space, it was only possible to include eight or nine authors in each category. In the selection of those authors, what took precedence, above all, was the quality of their works. But we also sought to present a panorama that was balanced as far as genre, generation, place of origin, style, and theme.
Other than that, we wanted to avoid repetition of Chilean authors already published in past issues of Review, especially those anthologized in Review 49, from 1994, except when the development and recognition of certain figures justified summoning them up again. This is the case of Jorge Edwards, for example, whose best novelistic production (seven novels) has appeared since the above date. This is also the case with Diamela Eltit, whose work received the National Prize for Literature in 2018.
The authors themselves selected their stories, poems, and academic essays with complete freedom. The only requirement was that their texts not exceed a length determined for all and that they not be published previously in English (for this reason some important authors, like Alejandro Zambra, couldn’t participate).
—C.F.
Note: All translated excerpts above are by the translators of the respective texts in the following pages, with the exception of the line from Neruda’s “The Widower’s Tango,” which is from Donald Walsh’s translation of that poem in Residence on Earth (New York: New Directions, 1973).
Samy Benmayor, Paracelso's Ladder, 2017. Oil on canvas, 79 × 118 in. Reproduced courtesy of the artist.
See portfolio of Benmayor's images, pp. 113–117.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Carlos Franz
Carlos Franz (1959) has published novels, short stories, and essays. His novels include: El lugar donde estuvo el Paraíso (1996; The Place Where Paradise Once Was), translated into eight languages and made into a film in 2001; El desierto (2006; The Absent Sea, Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 2011); Almuerzo de vampiros (2007; Lunch for Vampires); and Si te vieras con mis ojos (2015; If You Saw Yourself through My Eyes), which was awarded the Bienal de Novela Mario Vargas Llosa prize, for Best Spanish Language Novel in 2014-2016.