Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, A Bilingual Edition

by Jaime Saenz, Forrest Gander (Translator), Jaime Sænz

Immanent Visitor is the first English-language translation of the work of Bolivia's greatest and most visionary twentieth-century poet. A poète maudit, Jaime Saenz rejected the conventions of polite society and became a monk in service of his own imagination. Apocalyptic and occult in his politics, a denizen of slum taverns, unashamedly bisexual, insistently nocturnal in his artistic affairs, and secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological, and the symbolic. In masterly translations by two poet-translators, Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander, Saenz's strange, innovative, and wildly lyrical poems reveal a literary legacy of fierce compassion and solidarity with indigenous Bolivian cultures and with the destitute, the desperate, and the disenfranchised of that unreal city, La Paz.

In long lines, in odes that name desire, with Whitmanesque anaphora, in exclamations and repetitions, Saenz addresses the reader, the beloved, and death in one extended lyrical gesture. The poems are brazenly affecting. Their semantic innovation is notable in the odd heterogeneity of formal and tonal structures that careen unabashedly between modes and moods; now archly lyrical, now arcanely symbolic, now colloquial, now trancelike. As Saenz's reputation continues to grow throughout the world, these inspired translations and the accompanying Spanish texts faithfully convey the poet's unique vision and voice to English-speaking readers.

Genres: Poetry

180 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

En Saenz, vida y obra se suponen y se iluminan mutuamente. Así, la imagen de escritor rebelde, marginado, alcohólico, nocturno y enemigo del artificio de la “gente bien”, no sólo remite a uno de los pocos enfants terribles de las letras bolivianas, sino que es parte integrante de una vida que asumió la escritura con vocación monástica. El resultado fue una obra que es una visión de mundo extraordinaria y original, como pocas en el contexto de la literatura boliviana y latinoamericana.

Se puede decir que muy pocos representantes de la literatura, la música o la pintura contemporánea en Bolivia han dejado de tener alguna relación o influencia de Sáenz. Incluso su importancia se ha sentido en las nuevas generaciones de videastas y cineastas.

Tal vez lo que más llamó la atención, sobre todo a gente joven, fue el aspecto romántico de su estilo de vida, reflejado en su horario de trabajo y de vida social: dormir en el día y vivir de noche.

La publicación póstuma de su novela, Los papeles de Narciso Lima Achá (1991), arroja luces sobre otros dos importantes aspectos de su vida: su sexualidad y su atracción por el nazismo.

Esta última, similar a la de Ezra Pound en algunos elementos, fue más bien un rechazo a la sociedad burguesa moderna y una exaltación de lo irracional y lo esotérico como métodos de conocimiento del mundo.

De ahí que su interés por el nazismo estuvo más cerca de la magia que de la política. En cuanto a su sexualidad, un aspecto poco conocido de su vida, no hay duda de la importancia que debió tener el mundo de las relaciones homosexuales. Así lo prueba la escritura de Los papeles de Narciso Lima Achá, donde se narra básicamente una historia de amor entre un joven boliviano y uno alemán. Cabe señalar que Saenz nunca se definió como homosexual y su vida amorosa conocida estuvo siempre heterosexualmente orientada.

Lo cual se muestra, por ejemplo, en que Saenz se casó con una mujer alemana de origen judío y con ella tuvo una hija. Este matrimonio, donde lo judío y la heterosexualidad predominan, indica la dificultad de asignarle una etiqueta a sus intereses políticos y sexuales.

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am in your memory; make me know if your hands caress me
and if through them the foliage is breathing
—make me know the rain that falls on your secret body,
and whether it is the penumbra that veils it or the night ’s spirit.

Make me know, lost and vanished vision, what it was your gaze kept cloistered
from me—
—if it was the desired and secret gift
that my life waited all its life for death to receive.
*
The aloneness of the world. The aloneness of man. Man’s reason for being and
the world ’s
—the circular solitude of the sphere. Increment and decline;
the closing of the hermetic thing. The hermetic closing of the thing.
The immense, the immeasurable—the incommensurate grave, indivisible and
blank.
*
Many times searching without being able to find you, the twilight would
surprise me in the hour of your eyes.
Many times I forgot you, wanted to forget myself and remember, and
remembered I had to forget you,
thinking of you for the very reason I didn’t want to remember you
—the twilight would surround me at such times, I remember it perfectly.

*
I long for a certain wound that was yours, that gathered into a certain wound that
was mine,
which tunneled into the abyss of your eyes
—into the abyss of your eyes, in which I long for the abyss of your eyes.
*
To say farewell and become the farewell,
that is fitting.
*
The poetry unwinds in long lines marked by labyrinthine relationships, speculations on the poetic subject ’s otherness, and sharp linguistic paradoxes that border on nonsense. It does not offer itself to those looking for an easy and comfortable read.
[...]
As with his life, if you come close to his literature,you run the risk of being seduced forever. Then,either you are a Saenzian or you aren’t. Once drawn into his particular vision of the city of La Paz, his characters, and his meditations on death, it is difficult to relinquish his fascinating vision of the world. As with the work of all great writers, his generates a universe in and of itself, with its own times, laws, rites, and labyrinths. In the case of Saenz, that universe is modeled on a profound and singular vision of Bolivian (and Latin American) urban society, a complex and existential vision that has few counterparts in other Spanish literatures.

— from an afterword "The Saenz Effect" by Leonardo García-Pabón

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Many times searching without being able to find you, the twilight would surprise me in the hour of your eyes.
Many times i forgot you, wanted to forget myself and remember, and remembered I had to forget you,
thinking of you for the very reason I didn't want to remember you
—the twilight would surround me at such times, I remember it perfectly.
I confused you with the twilight confusing myself with you;
you confused me with the twilight confusing yourself with me,
and you and I confused ourselves with the twilight which confused you in me and me in you,
confusing with you what was confused in me to confuse with me what was confused in you.
And many times in the same person there was a confusion of twilight, you and me,
and many more each confused with three other distinct persons,
adding up to nine altogether, which is to say, zero."

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

A solid and enchanting poetry collection despite the frequent use of disembodied pronouns. Like Paul Celan's poetry, but more contradictory in its repetitions (which some may find tedious). Lines of ownership and belonging get blurred between objects, concepts, and especially body parts. Contradictions become the water you're swimming in, and reading it all (or mostly) in one go helps break down those logical barriers we often erect after reading too much unpoetic prose.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title poem (or, rather, the excerpts from it that are included in this edition) is amazing; Saenz has the kind of discursive mind that expresses itself better in long, meandering poems than in short ones. Via long series of imprecise verbal volleys, he attempts to approximate obscure ideas that are impossible to express exactly, in the same way that certain mathematical curves approach but never touch their asymptote. The abstruseness of Saenz's writing can be frustrating, and the reader must often force himself to be patient with the author's deliberate impenetrability, reminding himself that, in Saenz's words, "Love [is a] dark thing,/for whose explanation the tone will need to be dark, not lucid;/and I say that common sense only serves to explain itself to itself..." The payoff finally comes in the title poem, which exists in a strange universe of its own, a universe populated by weird sentences like "The water decants a hymn to freeze breath and shadow," a universe in which language has somehow been liberated from the mundane task of passively reflecting the realities of the ordinary world.

"If you don't pick up a spider's scent, you die;
but never if your brow were bitten, only so long as you didn't dream it was your own brow biting you."

[Krzysztof · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty disappointed with this. I remember reading some excerpts from "The Night" years ago and thinking they were pretty good. Gander also came highly recommended, but these poems are all essentially the same. Granted, if any obsession is reasonable, it's an obsession with death - but I didn't feel he was saying very much here, other than to rehash some Buddhist philosophy in dark, meta-looping, cosmological language.

The afterward states: "The poetry unwinds in long lines marked by labyrinthine relationships, speculations on the poetic subject’s otherness, and sharp linguistic paradoxes that border on nonsense."

Bordering on nonsense is being charitable, I think. "Labyrinthine" is a good word for it, though, as I was constantly reminded of Borges's "Labyrinths," which was also empty, repetitive and (faux)-metaphysical. Bolivia and Argentina. What's up with these places?

[Hollie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jaime Saenz is one of my favorite poets. His work is creepy, surrealist, and dream-like. At his best, it reminds me of the lesser known works of Salvador Dali. He tends to the macabre, seeing in every living person a dead one waiting to get out. But his poetry is not hopeless. There is often love and affection expressed for these inner-selves, with an awareness to the typical denial of their existence.

Saenz is not a comfortable poet, and I doubt he will achieve the popularity of Edgar Alan Poe. His work reaches inside the mind to make one uncomfortable, and does so with awareness of itself. These are poems for people who don't mind looking at things sideways once in a while. And for those who can really appreciate the mastery of the Spanish language he demonstrates.

[Inverted · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going through this Latin American poetry phase lately, and I want to start off with this poète maudit who some see as the singular poetic voice of Bolivia.

Update: Not as good as I hoped. I'm thinking it has to do with the translation. Maybe not. His excessiveness irks me sometimes, especially the deliberate repetition of a word within a line. I hope there's more of his later work translated, from As the Comet Passes onward.