Night

by Ennio Moltedo, Marguerite Feitlowitz (Translator)

Written during the Pinochet dictatorship but not published until democracy's return, Ennio Moltedo's NIGHT is a masterpiece of controlled rage, mourning, resistance, and astonishing humor, and the first of his books to appear in English translation. Ennio Moltedo (1931-2012), whom Raúl Zurita called "one of the finest, greatest, most curious and honorable poets of Chile," is at once lyrical and political, a dramatist, a historian, and a critic. Night is a Kafkaesque chronicle of the Pinochet era in prose poems that encompass the lyric, mini-drama, mini-epic, and micro-fiction, and which Esther Allen has called "surreal, agonized documents." "'How much longer?' asks Night, will we endure the 'well-dressed deplorables… The living dead brilliantly girded for power--on the escalator going up--lights, camera, fanfare--how much longer?' Written in response to the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz for our present moment in the United States, Moltedo's prose poems are surreal, agonized documents that merge historical fact with, in Feitlowitz's words, 'exquisitely controlled rage.'"--Esther Allen "Ennio Moltedo, translated now for the first time by the daring mind of Marguerite Feitlowitz, conveys the Chilean night in all its linguistic, political, and cultural darkness, affliction, and absence of ethics or the enduring wounds of Chile's dictatorship. In Night we see how land and military are irrevocably 'If you put your ear to the naked earth, you will precisely hear the murderers' names.' And indeed, these same murderers, or, 'authorities,' ask the people to 'renew their relationship with the sea,' the sea which the narrator has been dumped into. 'Let's search for a bit of truth amid towers of corpses,' writes Moltedo. In this quest for clarity amid darkness, Moltedo's poems reverberate with the force of a language writing its way out of the psychological shackles of the state." Daniel Borzutzky "Moltedo's Night asks us to never stop striving for freedom, for our own Paradise, no matter how much the night seems eternal."--Peter Valente, Heavy Feather Review Poetry. Latinx Studies. Translation.

104 pages, Paperback

Published November 15, 2022

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

One hundred-thirteen prose poems written in reaction to his nation’s fall into the hands of Augusto Pinochet and his willing accomplices, who turned Chile into a charnel house in honor of fascist glory: One is often struck, reading Ennio Moltedo’s Night, by the parallels to Trump and his acolytes and their worship of murderous thuggery. The hostility of fascist ideology to life-affirming natural forces is succinctly captured from the outset:

"At what time must the birds lined up in gardens, trees, and cages sing?
Look to the law."

Permission to live and act according to one’s own nature must be granted by a self-appointed authority in such a country. In our own country, whose so-called Supreme Court has brought to the ascendant the ideology of “original intention” in interpreting the Constitution—an intellectually asinine, factually unsupportable mode of interpretation (it lacks the philology required to support it, assuming its adherents have even heard of the word “philology”)—we veer precariously close to Robert Bork’s ideal:

"So as not to annoy, so as to clear the sky and earth of so much progress and to restore the enigma of history, I recommend that the highest and next highest powers—well, all the powers—legislate one more step back toward night: reinstate slavery."

(And, yes, Bork claimed that Lincoln’s emancipation of slaves was unconstitutional. Could Clarence Thomas be any stupider? Why gild the lily?)

Pinochet’s regime regularly engaged in rounding up dissidents, loading them handcuffed into helicopters, flying out to sea, and pushing the dissidents out. Hence Moltedo’s prose poem #12: “They have sent me to the bottom of the sea. Without oxygen, of course. In street clothes, with blue envelope in hand.” (Blue envelopes are Chilean equivalents of our pink slips.)

Leading the nation’s way is “The Champ” (who “goes around telling how he single-handedly defeated half the world”), proud of his cabinet:

"For the first time ever, I’m knocked out by what I see, it is (so, so, so) extraordinary—inner sigh number three—that I will offer it now to you. He turns and what do we see: the same assembly of moral defectives, seated in a semicircle, and appearing through a curtain of steam a new-minted male/female idiot looking back at us."

Marguerite Feitlowitz’s translation of Night imbues these prose poems with an immediacy that is frightening and portentous of our own nauseating future. At least climate catastrophe is an equal-opportunity offender.

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[Katie]

Unfortunately, this collection did not resonate with me. It is certainly interesting, and I am glad I decided to give it a go. However, I ultimately feel like these poems are too obscure for me to gain any deeper insight into them. I suppose one would have to be very familiar with the political circumstances that inspired Moltedo to truly make sense of his work. The brief introduction at the beginning of this volume is, albeit helpful, not enough.