The poetry of Raúl Hernández is a poetry of place. More specifically, it is a lyrical sequence that is driven by a sense of rootedness in certain areas of Santiago, Chile. And those areas of Santiago might not be the ones you think of when you think of a megacity of five million people or a national capital. For example, references to the Yungay neighborhood abound. It is neighborhood with a powerful sense of community that has fought to preserve its distinctiveness, in particular with regard to its late nineteenth and early twentieth-century architecture. For example, one poem is located outside the Novedades Theater, a small venue that has been in use for over a century. Another poem references the cité, a kind of urban housing style that can still be found in the Yungay neighborhood and few other places in Santiago. Originally intended to house workers in the nineteenth century, the cité is a mix of private and public spaces with high walls and beautiful gardens, pedestrian walkways and, in many cases, a mix of colors and architectural styles. Walking into one feels like walking into another century.
There are also many references that link the Yungay neighborhood to other parts of Santiago. The poem “Matucana Hotel” is imagined in the neighboring Matacuna neighborhood (where acclaimed cineaste Alejandro Jodorowsky grew up). Streets that connect the neighborhood to the rest of Santiago appear in two poems: “Cienfuegos Street” and “Huerfanos Street.” “Huérfanos” literally means “orphans.” The unusual nomenclature came about because there was an orphanage on this street that housed children whose parents died in cholera outbreaks in the 1870s. Today it cuts through to the current urban center of Santiago. The references to this street are as layered as the history of the street itself. Throughout this book, the poems are filled with nostalgia and appreciation for the past of the places they describe as well as a sense of the current, lived realities they represent.
In the U.S., Chilean poetry is most associated with the figure of Pablo Neruda, thanks in part to Robert Bly’s translations in the sixties, Neruda’s winning of the Nobel Prize in 1973 and his portrayal in the internationally acclaimed film Il Postino. The other Nobel Laureate of Chile, Gabriela Mistral, is perhaps less known in English but is nonetheless widely available for non-Spanish readers around the world. More recently, other Chilean poets like Enrique Lihn, Cecilia Vicuña or Raúl Zurita are becoming available in English thanks to the work of translators and scholars like John Felstiner, Anna Deeny and William Rowe. If that is the limit of your exposure to Chilean poetry, Raúl Hernández’s poetry might be a very welcome surprise. While rooted in the well-worn paths of the Yungay neighborhood, these poems aim to disconcert, to take the familiar landscape and make it unfamiliar. In the poem “Huérfanos Street,” for example, memories to turn into crumbs flung onto the sidewalk. In the poem “Muddy”, umbrellas turn into twisted crows. The poems seem to give a nod to Chilean poet Jorge Teillier, creator of the poetic current known as larismo (“lar” from the Latin for “hearth”) who sought to underscore the strangeness of our daily lives, all the while using the very stuff of our daily lives to do so. Like Teillier’s poetry, these pieces make the familiar feel out of the ordinary. They make memories into bread crumbs and umbrellas into crows in a literary gesture something akin to what the Russian formalists called “defamiliarization”: they make use of common elements in order to emphasize their strangeness.
There are also some aesthetic nods to Gonzalo Millán, under whom Raúl Hernández studied before Millán died in 2006. Dense and intense, at turns lyrical and at turns cacophonous, Millán’s poetry was full of images that sometimes shocked and sometimes soothed. And like Hernández, Millán wrote a long lyric sequence on Santiago, called La Ciudad, published in 1979 while he remained in exile. Millán, meditating on the injustices of the military dictatorship in Chile, wrote: “Traffic circulates./ Rumblings of war circulate./ Money circulates./ The blood circulates” (“Circulan los automóviles./ Circulan rumores de guerra./ El dinero circula. / La sangre circula”). Although writing in a radically different context, Hernández, much like Millán, connects city and individual, urban landscape and emotional landscape. However, Raúl Hernández’s poetry is new in its approach to the city: it penetrates the lesser visited crevices of the sprawling metropolis and speaks from within them. At once familiar and unfamiliar, by turns direct and oblique, this collection of poems is both haunting and comforting. It answers the question posed by one of my favorite verses by Jorge Teillier in the poem “V” of Crónica de un forastero (Chronicle of a Foreigner): “Where does that creaking sound of invisible doors come from?” (“¿De dónde viene ese chirriar de puertas invisibles?”).
RASGUÑOS
Los árboles han decidido seguir los pasos del viento.
Un árbol en la acera ha decidido rasguñar tu rostro con sus ramas
transferir un nuevo deseo en el inicio del mutismo
dejar aparte el material mascullado de la soledad.
Y agachado como ahora en la vereda inmensa del trasnoche
sangras de nieve y contorno
hasta socorrer el designio de esta suerte.
Sangras y dueles
a este árbol misterioso dueles.
Huyes como los animales inútiles del tiempo
que han visto el cuchillazo de cerca
y por sobre todo de cerca
han visto el rayo maligno
/ caer
sobre el cuerpo desnudo de esta ciudad.
SCRATCHES
The trees have decided to follow in the footsteps of the wind.
A tree on the sidewalk has decided to scratch
your face with its branches
to transfer a new desire at the outset of muteness
to set aside the chewed up matter of solitude.
And crouching like now
in the huge walkway of sleeplessness
you bleed snow and surroundings
until aiding the designs of this happenstance
You bleed and ache
you ache this mysterious tree
You flee like the useless animals of time
who have seen the knifing up close
and who have seen the malignant lightning
truly up close
/as it drops
on the naked body of this city.
LA LLUVIA MATA PAJARITOS
No me digas que esta es la lluvia mata pajaritos
mientras desanudas tu mano de la mía
y me dejas así
inútilmente desecho a la orilla de esta ciudad.
No me digas que se ha venido el diluvio
ahora que el vapor de nuestras respiraciones
se asemeja a navíos que buscan asilo en el puerto.
El frío cala hasta los huesos.
Los perros son fieles pasajeros de la calle vacía
y tú me miras a lo lejos
dividida entre los árboles y el espejismo.
Te alejas y me miras
y no sabes si decirme ven
o huir despavorida al cité de tardes perfumadas.
No me digas que mañana no sabrás despojarme de aguaceros
de jamases y de nuncas
y de esta lluvia que aniquila.
THE BIRD-KILLING RAIN
Don’t tell me this is the bird-killing rain
while you unknot your hand from mine
and so you leave me
uselessly undone at the edge of this city.
Don’t tell me that the flood has come
now that the steam of our breathing
looks like ships seeking asylum in the port.
Cold beats down to the bone
dogs are loyal passengers of the empty street
and you look at me from afar
divided between the trees and the mirage.
You grow distant and look at me
and you don’t know whether to say come here
or to flee terrified to the cité of perfumed afternoons.
Don’t tell me that tomorrow
you won’t know how to take the rain showers away from me
or the nevers and the evers
or this annihilating downpour.
HOTEL MATUCANA
Aún no solitario
aparecerás siniestro
por osadas calles sombrías.
El hotel ocultará valijas empolvadas
un pantalón
y mudas camas lunáticas.
Aún no solitario
con amistades fugaces en los pasillos
esconderás la quietud bajo la alfombra
y en el cuarto reinarán camisas por doquier.
Será algo extraordinario aparecer siniestro
por la neblina de la noche.
Aún no solitario
encendiendo un fósforo
en la escalera de la muerte.
MATUCANA HOTEL
Still not solitary
you will appear sinister
along intrepid, shadow-filled streets.
The hotel will conceal dusty suitcases
a pair of pants
and mute lunatic beds.
Still not solitary
with fleeting friendships in the hallways
you will hide calmness under the carpet
and shirts will reign all throughout the room.
It will be something remarkable to appear sinister
in the fog of the night.
Still not solitary
striking a match
on death’s stairway.
LLOVIZNA
Hay una sombra ahuyentada por los perros.
Hay peces agonizando en la cesta desierta.
Y nada hace suponer que en esta mañana
seguirán iluminados los rostros de las veredas.
Existes como niebla deshojada de plazas públicas
calientas el aire con tu oculto transitar.
Desde las ventanas de los colegios
te ven aparecer como el extraño que interrumpe la clase
entre un alumno y el pensamiento
entre la palabra clara y el destino
atravesando la capa del sopor y el deseo.
Hay una sombra ahuyentada por los perros
nada simplifica los ojos de la llovizna
y sin mirar hacia atrás
el caminante deambula jurándose ilusión.
Una limitada acepción del invierno
desde un rincón del camino.
DRIZZLE
There is a shadow shooed away by dogs.
There are fish that lay dying in the deserted basket.
And there is nothing to make one suppose that on this morning
the faces of the sidewalks will remain illuminated.
You exist as fog plucked from public plazas,
you heat the air with your hidden passing by.
From school windows
they see you appear as the strange one
who interrupts class
between student and thought
between clear word and destiny
crossing a layer of drowsiness and desire.
There is a shadow shooed by dogs,
nothing simplifies the eyes of drizzle
and, without looking back,
the passerby shuffles along swearing he is an illusion.
A limited meaning of winter
from a corner of the path.
ESTÉTICA DE LA LLUVIA
El pintor de Estética de la lluvia
perfecciona el trazo
vomita desde la ventana
sus pinturas vomita.
La mañana explosiva
se acercan las marchas y los maceteros desplomados.
Surgen los primeros aguaceros
los arcoíris surgen.
Una mujer bota un cigarrillo al suelo
llegan los espasmos y las úlceras venenosas.
Camina agachado.
Y el pintor obseso perfecciona la lluvia
que en el cuadro
/ parece morder.
Parece acuchillar.
AESTHETIC OF THE RAIN
The painter of Aesthetic of the Rain
perfects the stroke
vomits out the window
his paintings he vomits.
Explosive morning
the marches and collapsed flowerpot stands draw near.
The first showers spring up
and up spring the rainbows.
A woman throws her cigarette to the ground
spasms and poisonous ulcers arrive.
He walks hunched over.
And the obsessed painter perfects the rain
which in the painting
/seems to bite
seems to stab.
