"Motherfucking Spanish Language"

On Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet, Chilean poets, and the Bolaño business

Qué gano con decir
Yo me he portado bien
La poesía se ha portado mal
Cuando saben que yo soy el culpable.
¡Está bien que me pase por imbécil!

Nicanor Parra

When I was 19 and thought that I spoke Spanish, I tried to translate the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor. I remember spending quite a lot of time on line two. Que angel malo se paro en la puerta de tu sonrisa? Was it an evil angel or a bad angel that stopped itself at the door of your smile? To my ear, bad sounded better. I had recently read Paradise Lost, the first assigned text on my undergraduate degree. So numberless were those bad angels seen. That probably stuck somewhere in the back of my mind. An evil angel, which is what Eliot Weinberger puts in his translation, sounds kind of rhythmically silly to me. But then you wouldn’t translate Baudelaire’s poems as The Flowers of Bad, would you?

Huidobro’s poem, a long modernist masterpiece, was excerpted in an anthology of Latin American Poetry that my then girlfriend gave to me for my birthday. I had bored her, I am sure, with stories of my gap year travels to Latin America. It was nice of her to transmute that into a gift. But those same travels, and my somewhat annoying belief that I could meaningfully speak Spanish, also got in the way of my really reading the anthology. It was in translation. The originals were sort of awkwardly laid out underneath, with the line breaks only indicated by /. I’ll read them properly one day, in Spanish, I thought. But there’s always less time than you think.

I’m not sure if I ever asked her her opinion about the poem, or how best to translate it. Though it was in the book that she had given me, to me, it existed elsewhere, in abstract space, outside the world. I suppose that’s why I was drawn to a poem that kind of takes place in a void that its speaker is falling through.

One day, about three and a half years after that girlfriend had left me, and after my Spanish had not improved but grown rustier and rustier, I opened the book again. I read a poem by the Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas. I felt pretty keenly that I had wasted so much time not reading the book, not reading Gonzalo Rojas. I read more poems by him, and felt more distant from myself, from the person who had wasted the opportunity for a connection.

*

Gonzalo Rojas is the name of the main character (at least for the first half) of Alejandro Zambra’s Chilean Poet. It’s a joke. He is not the Gonzalo Rojas, but a different Gonzalo Rojas. Which is unfortunate for him because he also wants to be a poet. We are treated to some affectionate mockery of Gonzalo’s thought process as he chooses a name. Should it be Gonzalo Pasolini, or Gonzalo Ginsberg? What he chooses doesn’t really matter. His book of semi-self-published poems gathers dust on the shelves of a Santiago bookshop.

What matters instead is that he chooses to restart a relationship with an old flame, Carla, and to become a stepfather to her child, Vicente. The first half, which is in some ways the heart of the novel, is a comedy of remarriage and family reconstruction. It’s done with a wonderful lightness of touch. This familial comedy is, of course, mediated by Gonzalo’s desire to write poems. The way Zambra brings the family and the poetry together is subtle and touching. You can see this where Gonzalo becomes passionately invested in the question of how to name his relationship with Vicente. He rages at the etymology of the Spanish word for stepfather, padrastro:

“Then, as if manifesting an unformed thought, he grabbed the Spanish dictionary and looked up the word padrastro. He read the first entry: “The husband of one’s mother by a later marriage.” The second said, straight up, “Bad father.” The third was one he didn’t know: “Obstacle, impediment, or inconvenience that hinders or does damage to a thing.” Even the fourth meaning, rather technical, struck him as humiliating: “Small piece of skin that separates from the flesh immediately around the fingernails, causing pain and discomfort; hangnail.”

Goddamned dictionary, motherfucking Spanish Royal Academy, he thought. Who was the bad father, the obstacle and impediment, just who was the one who hindered, who did damage? Shouldn’t he be off living in a perfectly furnished bachelor pad where he could sleep with half of Santiago, where he could fuck girls a whole lot hotter than the ones Vicente’s dad probably fucked? Didn’t he deserve that, in a way?

Motherfucking Spanish language, he thought again, out loud this time, in the scientific tone of someone confirming or identifying a problem. No Spanish word that ended with the suffix -astro meant or could ever mean anything other than contempt or illegitimacy. “The calamitous suffix -astro “forms nouns with pejorative meanings,” said the RAE Dictionary: musicastro, politicastro: inept musician, unskilled politician. The same source defines the word poetastro simply as “bad poet.”

“What does your padrastro do?”

“My padrastro is a poetastro.” He imagined Vicente giving that reply.”

This captures something of the tone of the novel, warm, and, as novels perhaps should be, profoundly concerned with relationships and relating, and their impediments, or the inconveniences that hinder or do damage to things.

One of these is language itself. I particularly like the way that the sentence beginning the third paragraph works: Motherfucking Spanish language, he thought again, out loud this time, in the scientific tone of someone confirming or identifying a problem. The sentence, as translated by Megan McDowell, is a series of rug pulls. Even as it’s perfectly possible to imagine someone saying Motherfucking Spanish language in the tone described, we don’t hear that tone at first; we get these corrections. From thinking to speaking. From speaking in a way that seems to have burst the bounds, back to a controlled speaking. There’s something here that sort of embodies the restraint of a passion that the whole passage is about. I would also note that Gonzalo is complaining about language but also about his status in a hierarchy established by who had sex when with Vicente’s mother. A problem of relationships is turned into a problem of language. Perhaps that’s what it means to be a writer. Maybe especially a poet.

*

This use of poetry to mediate the domestic comedy, I think, is the source of one of the more important tensions in the book. Chilean Poet is, in some ways, a very conventional novel—much more so than Zambra’s other works. If you called it Fathers and Sons, it wouldn’t be a terribly inaccurate title. It has that character of a breakout into the mainstream that you often see across media. The smoothing of rough edges and the embrace of the classic themes.

Zambra occasionally jokingly kicks against the well madeness of the novel, including an ending that is not so much a metafictional rug-pull but more like the trick where you whip the tablecloth from out under the dishes without ruining the meal. But none of the still roughened edges of this multigenerational family story take away from what reviewers would likely call its humanness. Still, I want to probe a little into what that poetry does for the novel, because it offers a couple of ways into what makes this such a novelistic novel.

*

It’s a personal theory of mine, for which I have very little evidence, that the increased visibility, in recent years, of the poet’s novel, novels by poets, novels about poets, serves as a kind of formal (and also a business) resolution of an artistic problem that I’ve talked about before—how to represent the global economy in your novel. One vague, larger article of faith of mine is that to really fulfil the demands of the novel form, a book has to be about money, or the tensions between love and money, the way that feelings and relationships can or cannot be translated into money or distorted by them. It’s what makes the novel distinct from the prose romance.

To do this, you need some sense of the system that money makes possible. In the modern global economy, the system itself becomes harder to depict, at least with authority by middle class intellectual types.

But one way, the via negativa, you might call it, might be to think about poetry. It serves, kind of, as the opposite of that little nameless object that Chad Newsome’s family manufactures in The Ambassadors. It does not make money but it is not vulgar to talk about. Poetry serves as the opposite of a commodity for many people. It’s their idea of the opposite of money.

This fact has been sensed by more money adjacent types. A few years ago, there was a real surge in poetry and the uses of poetry in the visual art world. Looked at from a distance, it seemed that this was partly a way of reckoning with or gesturing to contemporary art’s total capture by money, a search for an outside to that. Putting poetry into your visual art was a little bit like an 18th century landscape painter drawing a commons that was basically not worth enclosing. Putting the worthless medium inside the moneymaking one was a gesture of, not exactly resistance, but mourning, or melancholy. Much of the art that I personally saw produced in this vein was bad. The poetry written by the artists was, if anything, even worse.

I’m well aware, by the way, that poetry does in fact participate in the capitalist economy. But, speaking at least of actually literary poetry, it does so via a kind of hierarchy of prestige largely sheltered within the world of higher education, rather than as a commodity in the way that novels do. It’s precisely this prestige, its sort of independence from money, what Pierre Bordieu might call the poetry world’s restricted field, that allows it to function as a kind of anti-money in the novels of Ben Lerner, for example. This also explains why publishers can buy middlebrow novels by poets for pre-packaged literary credentials, cashing in on that same absence of money as a prestige signal. Poetry is classiness—unlike James’s nameless little object, you can talk about it, because it doesn’t sully you by associating you with commerce.

But of course it does. And maybe too it draws attention to the absence of production, of the forces of production from your novel. Poetry is the waste product of the wealth of the deindustrialised world.

*

But what if you’re from a country that is not in the ‘global north’, but which has long justly prided itself on its poetic tradition, and has even turned it into a kind of export? In the second half of Chilean Poet, after Gonzalo and Carla’s relationship has broken down, we follow the fortunes of Vicente. Gonzalo has left for New York, to do a PhD in literary studies. He doesn’t keep in touch, and Vicente is giddily adrift and trying to make it in the world of Chilean poetry. He doesn’t like to be reminded about the comparison with his stepfather.

We meet him as he strikes up a relationship with Pru, an American journalist, who has come to write an article about Chile. When she meets Vicente’s friend Pat, also a poet, she learns, as many tourists do, that Chile is an especially poetic country:

“In Chile we have beautiful views and good wine, but for me personally, the best is the poetry,” says Pato. “It’s the only really good thing in Chile. The only thing we win the world cup in—two world cups, actually, two Nobel prizes. We’re two-time world champions of poetry, it’s the only thing we win at.”

“I was thinking of writing about the street dogs. What are they called here? Quiltris?”

“Quiltros,” Pato corrects her. “Why do they interest you so much?”

“It’s just that there are so many, it’s shocking.”

Poetry is here another piece of local colour. The running gag comparison of the Chilean poets with the stray dogs from Pru’s point of view works, I think, as a way of making Chile digestible. It is part of what makes Chile visible to others in the world. Poetry, and the great Chilean prose laureate of poetry, Roberto Bolaño. When Pru hangs out with Vicente and his friend Pato, she tells them “you guys are like Bolaño characters”. When she tells her editor that she wants to write about Chilean poetry, he is excited:

Gregg loves the idea of an article about a literary country, a country where poetry is oddly, irrationally important.

How do the current Chilean poets dialogue with that legacy? What is it like to be a poet in a country where apparently poetry is the only good thing? He asks her to interview poets who are unknown to English-speaking readers, a broad range of them, of all ages—the idea is to capture the atmosphere, the scene.

“We’re going to discover a bunch of savage detectives,” says Gregg, visualizing the article printed in the magazine, much more enthusiastic than Pru.

Chilean poetry becomes a kind of commodity. It is an export made famous by Neruda, Parra, Mistral, and perhaps most of all, to the non-reader of poetry, by Bolaño.

*

I don’t want to get too bogged down in Bolaño. His position in World Literature as an institution is fairly self-evident. As is his greatness. Personally, I love dude-bro-red flag-type authors (except Cormac McCarthy) but I love Bolaño especially. The fact that there are critics who mainly think about him as a marketing phenomenon is proof of both the ingenuity of critics and the perverse incentives of literary criticism. No one ever went broke criticising the process of literary canon formation.

*

But even if Bolaño is not the pure product of a marketing phenomenon. Even if he is in a sense that matters, worth it, he has produced a marketing phenomenon. And this marketing phenomenon is part of what helps to sell Chilean poetry to consumers who might read Zambra outside of Chile, and especially in McDowell’s translation.

*

Chilean poetry is in some sense the hook of Chilean Poet. Of course it is, dumbass, it’s in the title, I  hear you saying. But think about that for a second. This is a novel about family, about remarriage, about fatherhood and the complexity of our chosen bonds. That’s stuff that’s much more likely to make a novel a hit than poetry. Even though the poet’s novel is on the rise within the somewhat restricted field of literary fiction, it doesn’t seem like it will really go the distance with fathers and sons as a theme.

And yet, what if you’re a Chilean writer, who wants to tell a family story, something that is in some ways a world away from the extremity and immaturity of Bolaño’s poetas malditos? People’s easiest reference point for you is going to be Bolaño, but you, even if you love him, might want to be about another business.

As national export, and through Bolañismo, poetry might then come to stand in for what grants your story access to the world market. This isn’t exactly a conscious ‘theme’ of the novel, but it’s also not a subconscious symptom, or something that I want to bring out from behind Zambra’s back. It’s a kind of formal aspect of the story. The horizon of interpretation of world lit via Bolaño kind of distorts your story. It’s interesting then, for a writer to see if they can bend in that direction in an interesting way. Can you make that expectation part of the problem space of the novel?

*

Vicente and Pato are not really like Bolaño characters. They’re not really entangled in the kind of web of atrocity and pointlessness and that Bolaño likes to weave. But to Pru, initially, that’s how the Chilean poets she meets seem accessible.

*

So in one way the task of Chilean Poet, especially its second half, is to reconcile the tension between poetry (Chilean especially) as a commodity—one which will also govern Zambra’s reception— and what most matters to the novel; the personal relationships, romantic and familial. If the commodity, in Marxian terms, is not just the finished product but the veil that product throws over the social relationships that produced it, that is kind of what Chilean Poet sets its use of poetry against. The function of the poetry in the book is to be dissolved back into the lives that it punctuates.

To that end, poetry itself is never quite allowed the force of revelation. It doesn’t exceed the occasion of its reading or speaking as much as it reminds people of occasions and relationships. Vicente becomes a poet, partly as an echo of his lost stepfather, but also because of his relationship with a girl named Virginia who makes him take his ex-step-father’s poetry books off the shelves. Even then, he doesn’t like them until she leaves too. The poetry is a way of dwelling on lost connections.

*

That’s often how people get into works of art. By a certain kind of attunement to the absence of a person in the space of the poem. The mixtape made by an ex. The film you may have watched together but stared at your phone through. I used to hate how often the girlfriend who gave me the Latin American poetry anthology listened to John Cale. In her absence I grew to love Paris 1919.

*

But to go too far in this direction would be to say that the poetry is merely a kind of metaphor for the relationships that bring it into being. Which of course it is. That’s why people write poetry.  Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. Nevertheless, there is something in the poetry, in the way you can use poetry, that makes it not any old fungible absence but a specific absence. Not just a metaphor, but a symbol, something that acquires its own reality. You might grow to love a shitty work of art because it reminds you of someone, but a real one you’ll eventually love for itself.

And Zambra is interested in poetry, not simply as a metaphor for certain kinds of relationships (or if we’re being technical a vehicle for the tenor of certain kind of relationships). He’s interested in what it offers to those relationships.

The novel is about the pleasures of repetition, the importance of coming back to things and seeing them again, and what else is poetry for? Memorable speech. The kind of speech that bears repeating.

*

Perhaps Zambra is too forgiving, of poets, of fathers, of language. There are writers who want to burn through language. I think of Bolaño as one of them. Poetry, for him, sort of stands against life—rather than enriches it. It’s one of the things that makes his books compelling. But it also can be packaged and sold as romantic fantasy, even if that might be a weird thing to say about By Night in Chile.

And then there are writers who have a more lenient attitude to it. Lenience of this kind seems to be a sign of some kind of emotional or psychological maturity. To accept relationships and relatedness. To not strike out for some beyond or cry out in despair and hatred at the impossibility of finding it. I do not know whether that is a good or a bad thing in a writer.

*

Pru, in the novel, has trouble with Spanish genders (I always forget the gender of agua). You can see that in the line above about the stray dogs (Quiltris—qulitros). Vicente writes her a rather lovely poem, after she has left, about this foible. He reads it not to her, but to his stepfather, Gonzalo, who has returned to Chile.:

In my mother tongue the word for earthquake

is masculine

(Though I may disagree)

The word for tattoo is too

The mole on your skin—that’s male.

But a freckle is female

Like a scar, like a wound

Like the rain and a raindrop

But a leak, now that one is male.

The wind is a he

Same as thunder and lightning

But the snow (which I’ve never seen) is a she

And the frost (which I have) is also a she

And so is the drizzling rain

And the storm

The word for lamp is a she, naturally

And likewise the word for table

And the word for word

And the word for chard

In my language the words for winter, summer, and fall

are all male

Only spring is a female season

I may disagree, and I do

But those are the words that we have.

A fingernail (she) and nail clippers (he)

A bottle (she) and its opener (he)

But a foot and a kick are both he

night and midnight, hers and hers

day and midday, his and his

But shadow and sun, hers and his

body and space are his

hand and blouse are hers

But foot and footfall, his and hers

And the desire to never play with words again

(is all mine)

And the desire to never play with words again

And the desire to never play with words again

Together, in the absence of Pru, the poem helps them find each other. But so would a conversation. The point is it does it better. There’s more room to live in a poem.

The obstacle for any writer is language. Motherfucking Spanish language (McDowell says some really interesting things about translating this poem and the liberties she takes with it here). Language is a set of relationships that the poet wants to make into a thing or a substitute relationship. Even a poet who is not a poetaster, like a stepfather who is not a disastrous one, cannot really have the real relationship that  they want. They have to play with words, and not with the world, or the person, the body of the beloved.

The repetition is itself a playing with words, a way of making them get as close as possible to the thing they cannot be.

*

So poetry is a kind of obstacle to what the novel really wants to be about, how it really wants to be received, and also the best way of getting as close as it can to what it wants to be. I think this is something Zambra does really wonderfully. He repeatedly puts an obstacle in the way, including the obstacle that is the institution of world literature, until it becomes a medium for connection. The thing that might make a book called Chilean Poet sell, the glamour of Bolañismo, the export commodity Chilean poetry, gets in the way of what he means, until it doesn’t. One of my favourite poems describes itself as a public place achieved against subjective odds and then mainly an obstacle to what I mean. I get the sense that this wouldn’t be lost on Zambra. The novel’s meditation on fathers and sons has to get lost in language, and then, for me, and I imagine most people who read this post, in another language, in order to come back.