Y cuál es la relación, dijo Pancho,
Entre Morfeo, dios
Del sueño
Y morfar, vulgo
Comer?
Sí, eso dijo,
Abrazado por la cintura
De la bella Margarita,
Flaca y casi desnuda
En un bar de Lince, una noche
Leída y partida y
Poseida
Por los relámpagos
De la quimera.
Nuestra necesidad.
Nuestra boca abierta
Por la que entra
La papa
Y por la que salen
Los sueños: estelas
Fósiles
Coloreadas con la paleta
Del apocalipsis.
And what is the relationship, asked Pancho,
Between Morpheus, god
Of Sleep,
And morfar, slang
To eat?
Yes, that’s what he said,
Hugged around the waist
By the lovely Margarita,
Skinny and almost naked
In a bar in Lince, one night
Glimpsed and fractured and
Possessed
By the lightning bolts
Of the chimera.
Our necessity.
Our open mouth
Where bread
Goes in
And dreams
Come out: vapor trails
Fossils
Colored with the palette
Of the apocalypse.
—Roberto Bolaño, "Los neochilenos" ("The Neochileans"), in Tres, translated by Laura Healy, New Directions 2011 (NOTE: Fixed a small typo in the Spanish; thanks to commenter Rotch for pointing it out.)
Nice!
Bolaño.
(I generally won’t read poetry in translation, but I might have to make an exception for Bolaño, since I’ve already bought and read all his prose in translation.)
Bolaño.
I think he wins the Most Important Author of the Last 30 Years award pretty easily.
For starters, Petey, Samuel Beckett didn’t die until 1989.
For anybody so inclined, the complete poem is a free download with the McSweeneys App for certain devices. It’s all as brilliant as this extract.
Fantastic.
By the way, there was a new Bolaño story in The New Yorker last week, which thankfully wasn’t behind the paywall!
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2012/01/23/120123fi_fiction_bolano
Unfortunately, TNY also printed this highly questionable blog piece on the author:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/01/in-the-labyrinth-a-users-guide-to-bolano.html#ixzz1jy5hbMcQ
“Unfortunately, TNY also printed this highly questionable blog piece on the author”
“Highly questionable” is putting it mildly. Saying The Third Reich or The Skating Rink are only for “completists” is like saying The Gambler is only for Dostoyevsky completists…
And the 2666 anti-recommendation is odd, to say the very least.
(The only Bolaño prose translation I’ve avoided is Monsieur Pain, and that’s mainly because Bolaño himself warns readers away from it.)