Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson
Jaime Saenz —
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I. Some Things You Should Know about Jaime Saenz
It was with a human leg that Jaime Saenz, Bolivia’s visionary and most influential poet, came home from the university. Still living with his mother. Death, his constant companion. |
Saenz with U.S. Embassy personnel, ca. mid-60s, mysteriously rubbing his hands before an early-version computer. In his late poetry, Saenz will excoriate the technology of war and condemn the technophiles to the ninth circle of Hell. |
Eventually, of course, the police were summoned. You can’t keep a human leg hidden under your bed while you live with your mother. |
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And there is plenty of humor at a drinking party of Bolivian literati. After we read from our first book of translations of Jaime Saenz’s poetry (Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz) to a full house at CEDOAL, Bolivia’s principle cultural center, people gather at a bar in Sopocachi, a fashionable section of town. When we both stand, somewhat ceremoniously, to make a toast to Saenz, one of Bolivia’s prominent critics jumps up, clacks his heels and extends his arm in mock fascist salute. No one seems discomfited by the gesture except us.... |
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II. La Paz, that Thin-aired and Scarcely Believable City
Without foreknowledge, we arrive in La Paz on the day of the solstice, the Aymara new year.
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The streets are bright with the breathy, joyous crossing melodies of pipes and Andean flutes. Unlike most other Latin Amerian capitals, La Paz is an overwhelmingly indigenous city. Most of the women along the street are Aymara, cholas paceñas in elaborate heavy skirts, called polleras, and derby hats, their rainbow-colored rebozos (portage or carrying shawls) full as spinnakers over their backs. |
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The city clings to a landscape that resembles a grooved funnel. A mountain-rimmed vortice of congested streets eases us down to Plaza San Francisco and the central street that drains away into the wealthier neighborhoods of La Paz. |
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In the cathedral square, an old man indicates to me with one of his stumps to put the coins in his coat pocket. |
III. Imaginary and Real Photographs
Here we imagine Jaime Saenz sitting on the curb with an old man by Plaza San Francisco. The only language they share is a bottle they pass back and forth. |
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Late at night, at the house of Jaime’s younger sister, we are shown many photographs. One of them is of his only child, the girl born of his German Jewish wife who was an organizer for the Bolivian fascists just before World War II. Jaime Saenz never saw his daughter at the age she is in this photograph, about sixteen, with long dark hair and dramatic, sad, mascara-ed eyes. After the war, when the child was still a baby, her unhappy mother, giving up on the marriage (and, one presumes, the politics), hauled her back to Germany. |
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Saenz claimed with bravado to have fought against Titoist forces in Yugoslavia, but this has been disproved by facts of chronology. One would like to be able to say that he unambiguously renounced his political past. But it is simply not clear what his attitude toward fascism became later in life. He remained an avid reader of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and German Romanticism until his death. Like Pound, he elected to distance himself via silence from the matter of his earlier affiliations. Whatever the case, this much can be said: There is no evident mark of anti-Semitism or racism in his voluminous work (poetry, fiction, criticism, drama, and non-fiction); to the contrary, a profound and prolific empathy for the oppressed — the non-Spanish, the laborers, the homosexuals, the outcasts — is to be found there. And in the great indigenous and working class revolution of 1952 against the right-wing oligarchy that had long ruled his nation, Saenz put his military training from Germany to use, fighting on the barricades with miners, shopkeepers, students, and Aymara. Juan Lechin, Latin America’s leading Trotskyist, and the country’s most influential Marxist thinker, became a close friend and correspondent. And in The Night, Saenz paints the plotters of the attempted fascist coup of October, 1979 (led by the infamous General Natush Bush) as flesh-eating demons. How to explain this aparapita’s coat of ideological paradoxes? Can it be explained? In what way, exactly — with this poet whose very grammar is Janus-faced with paradox — should it be? |
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Here is the first page of one of those announcements, reproduced from Blanca Wiethüchter’s Memoria Solicitada, a narrative centered on her apprenticeship to, and deep friendship with, Saenz. (The call for attendance reads that the “Convocation” has been beamed by means of telepathy to all the “subsidiary” cacho branches of the world. (Cacho is the Andean version of ‘craps’.) Under “Retadores” (Challengers) are the compulsory pseudonyms to be adopted by the players elected from the many applicants. Saenz was always game master, the “Jurjizada.” It was a kind of Jack Spicer Magic Workshop, but arguably more demanding. |
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Here, we imagine the four houses in which Saenz lived on Miraflores Avenue. As each lease expired, with rent payments due, he moved farther away from the city into the quiet, which he loved, but also into isolation. |
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He rarely left his room in his last years. To see him, it was necessary to take a taxi to his house. He might be found lying in bed, drinking a cup of maté with seven sugars and reading a new poem to his friend, the young poet Blanca Wiethüchter. It is her dissertation for the Sorbonne on his body of work that will first bring him major critical attention. |
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The memorable evening at Blanca’s art and antique-filled house with her husband Alberto Villalpando, and their daughters and their companions. Blanca brings out Saenzian treasures bequeathed to her — photos, letters, the original typescripts of The Cold, Death by Feel, To Cross This Distance, all with many notations in his hand. And there is an unpublished libretto for an opera scored by Alberto, Bolivia’s most famous composer. The opera is never produced because Saenz decides at the last minute that he will not allow it. He apparently never explains why. “All he said on the phone,” says Alberto, “is ‘No, it’s impossible, it can’t be done.’ So I said, ‘What the hell do you mean, Jaime? We’ve spent more than two years on this thing!’ And he just says, ‘No, no, it’s impossible, it can’t be done.’ And that was the last time we ever directly spoke.” |
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Below is a photograph of the editors of Bolivia’s leading literary journal, Global Lepidoptera, the pillars of Llojata poking above the wall of poet Humberto Quino’s house. They publish the great Latin American poets unknown to us. And they’ve translated Dickinson, Whitman, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Auden, Lowell, Plath, and Ginsberg, among others. News of our more recent poetry hasn’t reached them yet — just as almost none of their more recent poetry has reached us. In fact, almost none of their literature has reached us, colonial, modernist, or postmodern! |
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Perhaps it was from El Montículo that Saenz began to form his idea, seriously held, from all accounts, that La Paz was cupped on a thin shell of rock over a vast chasm, and that one day the shell would break and the city fall, like a yolk, into the fathomless Hades beneath it. |
IV. First Day in La Paz
Overheard conversation: Don’t let the taxi driver turn the lights out at night. Ask him to turn them back on. |
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All day there are lines by Plaza San Pedro and on Illampu Street where hechiceros (shamans), seated on small wooden stools and holding frying pans over braziers, melt lead, plomo, into a brilliant silver-white liquid that supplicants ladle into a bucket of cold water. Immediately, the lead solidifies into grotesque shapes that tell the future for those who have faith. Here is the alchemists’s dream, the lead of spirit transformed into a luminous and malleable promise. |
V. Accounts of the Poet
Dinner with the wonderfully kind and brilliant Vicky Ayllon, Director of the CEDOAL, and with the country’s most famous actor, David Mondaca, who has been making a film about Jaime Saenz. As fireworks celebrating the Festival of San Juan explode over the city sprawling beyond the restaurant’s tinted window, he alternately talks about Saenz and impersonates him. His face concentrates and breaks into what can only be called a radiance. Each time he says Jaime, his voice drops a register and he allows a drag between the syllables to lengthen the name and give it weight. |
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Jaime was el hijo de Illimani, continues David Mondaca, he was the son of that colossal mountain which presides over La Paz. Also, he was a magic man, era brujo. David thoughtfully pulls the end of an imaginary mustache with his thumb and forefinger, and then he draws his palms together over his mouth, praying hands channeling a secret prayer. And a voice comes through him but from somewhere else. It is a swallowed voice, a voice from inside a well, the voice of someone without teeth, of someone whose tongue can’t quite get out of breath’s way. His words are banked into his inner cheek. They are all but effaced of their distinct phonemes before they finally erupt as the rolling growl of Jaime Saenz. |
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VI. Last Day in La Paz
We learn our first Aymara expression: If you have to lay down your life, you do it. |
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Notes
Note 1:
However, it is important to note that Borges was actually a political conservative who was also an ardent anti-fascist, and he stood against its rise in the 1930s when significant numbers of Latin American writers and artists enthusiastically supported its European manifestations — including some who later became prominently identified with Marxism. While Borges did indeed offer lamentable endorsements of the vicious far-right Chilean and Argentine juntas late in his life, some of which he later repudiated, it bears emphasizing that he publicly attacked fascism throughout its officially-sanctioned apogee in the Peronist era. And he courageously stood up against anti-Semitism as early as 1934, in his essay ‘I, A Jew’. We thank Eliot Weinberger for pointing out the need for this clarification.
Note 2: The Aymara are Andean Indians, a large South American indigenous group living in the vast windy Titicaca plateau of the central Andes in modern Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, numbering up to two million.
Note 3: As Luis Antezana explains in his Afterword to our translation of The Night: ‘One of Saenz’s most famous characters is the aparapita of La Paz. An aparapita is an indigenous immigrant — more precisely, an Andean Indian or “Aymara” — who lives in poverty in the city and its fringe neighborhoods. Although one can imagine him as an actual homeless man of the large Western cities, an aparapita is not a drifter or a beggar; mostly, he works as a porter in the public markets or in the transportation centers and stockyards. In Saenz’s world, the aparapitas also frequent the garbage dumps and spend their nights drinking alcohol in taverns of an infamous type. When he knows his life has been long enough, an aparapita works tirelessly to make enough money to drink himself to death... When he finally dies, his few belongings are inherited by his fellow aparapitas and his anonymous body ends up in the morgue; but, according to local beliefs, his “spirit” now protects his friends in the tavern...’
Note 4: Kreis: a select and secretive circle of writers led by a charismatic figure. The term is generally associated with Stefan George’s group in late nineteenth- century, early twentieth-century Germany. In contemporary times the term has been used in association with the 1960s Jack Spicer circle in San Francisco.
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Forrest Gander’s author notes page gives more recent information on his work, |
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