II
Thus fallen, piece by piece,
block by block,
like dismantlable figures or shoes that walk
without anyone to direct them,
like neutral or vegetal matter at the edge of collapse,
perfect lightness,
corposity more than admired and admirable
that shapes a vast immaterial territory
licked by the tongue,
traveled always by the same cold tongue
that passes and repasses over the same cold bodies,
the bodies frozen by the burning coolness
of the cold tongue
that is made and unmade on a burning body,
bodies so similar to fryers
or little personal crematories,
urns positively sweet or perfidious variants
of an exile in which all that is left
is the ash of a lost love,
advanced death or passion that subtracted itself into the fire
and dug into flesh glimpsed many times
stripped nude,
auscultated,
bodies thus,
falling bolt by bolt,
like destruction caused by the moon
or lips seeming like a slaughter of doves
throats slit, asleep,
bodies stupefied by the fire or anxiety,
by the excessive contention of the burning,
of the isolated that is left behind when you all flee
or inhabit the unpopulated zones of the planet,
the dry regions that wound up submerged
in an almost absolute paleness
or green-hooded lady sent by death
who rang cowbells to warn that the visitors
were arriving
the shady guests that take off their enormous wings
and convince the bodies that it is better to continue fleeing
to stop in the neutrality of the rooms that
demonstrate a total indifference before the loud noises
that arrive from silence to lose themselves among the lethal waters
in which the insomniacs wander,
the perfidious sleepless gentlemen who are accustomed
to drinking their mezcal at indecent hours
and dressing in white shrouds,
speaking hoarsely,
coughing or cursing between bronchial mugs of coffee
or cigarettes that sneeze like cheap thugs.
(Lose yourselves,
Bodies,
and return,
though to search for salvation is senseless
fall in the lethalness of lust or restrict to the maximum
your habitual pessimism of removing souls from Purgatory
and believe in the exalted virtues of sin.)
Bodies,
so fallen,
so crumbling from rusted bricks,
so handsome for your being an overflowing of light,
part of the water,
shadow of air,
living reflection of an immense space that goes mad with love
for the reflections that arrive from you,
abrasive but calming, at once
(moss, refuge of impiety, sedentary water
or moon roughly touched by sobs of crystal
that can’t understand why they sob or that
there is something like a tremor in the
impiety that crosses the walls),
cauterific
but burning
(how so!)
ardiferous,
ardent bodies that blacken and scorch.
Bodies that turn to ash,
bodies that end up converted into ash,
ashen bodies but muddied by the tongue,
always the tongue that chokes on ash,
tongue of ash,
tongue of soot that slowly masticates the ash
in which bodies that are touched but now ash
licked by ash,
only humid ash,
lost light,
purest air,
or perfected, by being precisely the unfindable
or form in which the Form loses all perception of the world
and is kept alone,
isolated and determines its fundamental being
without anything that attracts or forces its bloody essence to melt
that collapses and stays like an irreflexive and unconnected form
of the remaining, obligated forms,
contorted in the forced solitude where mirrors live.
(The Mother-Form doesn’t sob
but dies
filling up its skull with little bones
that are like the memory of a woman who becomes a penumbra
under a desperately dead night.)
III
Time is depopulated,
but the formless is what remains
as bodies in a violent state of emergency,
placed in the midst of abrupt consequences,
serious doubts,
interrogations derivable from ill-fated results,
various adversities and the least news favorable
to the navigation of antiquated maps,
the old folios that signal demolished bodies
and, then,
are reconstructed like new bodies, but poorly made,
like bodies that were dismantled and could,
much later, have had their diverse scraps recycled,
the violent parts infuriated by not being where they are supposed to be
that they should look good,
being as they were in their previous manufacture as such bodies,
not complete, perhaps,
even if the broad strokes
the great delineations of their compelling forms,
but feeble,
barely firm or, on some occasions, slightly
hunchbacked,
somewhat deformed or poorly calibrated in their engines,
or made to walk slow,
without loud sounds or siren’s song
that seduces the shipwrecked,
the famed drowned that swim with complete desperation
but never arrive at any island
nor find empty tequila bottles with messages
that point the way,
the precise direction to arrive where nobody is moved
with such imprecision in the schedule of the ships
or with so many passengers aboard that you have no idea
that the purple-colored things regret,
by general rule, their prior loves.
Bodies without their body, and lacking forcefulness,
with the vigor of a wing or the definitive decision to be a bird,
to go far away,
bodies as if in flight or passion softened
by so many anxieties that were unable to thread themselves together,
that remained loose,
unnamed,
detached like flesh not subject to firm decisions
that fluctuate between wanting and not wanting to surrender
to the perpetual joys,
the grand cramps that the flesh produces when it boils
and the tumult of the dense waters does not allow perceiving that they lack
the wires that sustain the exquisiteness of the fleshific forms,
the concrete lost among the abstractness of the fleshific mass,
with the avidness missing in the impure purity of the flesh,
but impure in all its purity,
like water in the delirium of being whirl or wind
that would like to become in the clearest horizon
of bodies that don’t cease arriving,
leaving,
playing,
dancing,
bodies that are as if in a state
of permanent emergency,
pursuit through the mirrors to the place
where the abandoned dynamite is waiting
for its moment to shatter everything,
lacerate the stars the skin of the burnt ones
and the bodies fleeing with infinite seriousness
from a wrecked ship
or the smile of a gloomy phantom that penetrates beyond
the whispers in which the bodies speak when they dream
or think of the dead like a handbook for abstaining from alcohol
though in the past they drank daily but, since, have repented
and beat their breasts and swear not to drink the turpentine
that the heavy lovers drink, excepting fine, delicate liqueurs
from honest gentlemen won over to virtue through the dark arts
of the Demon clothed as a woman and who offers discounted
paradises located in dead hallways,
lecheries to order, false documents
for an identity also falsified
and without uncomfortable twins that impede everything,
interfere in family affairs,
besiege the bodies with the improper pretension
of murdering anyone else who also stalks
the bodies and to be the only one who dominates each body
understood as a personal attribute
and from all of the bodies, although not in general,
but discriminately, with an aesthetic rigor
quite intolerant with respect to failures of structure
or lightly sour humor
but with completely confirmable beauty
simply seen, and at a great distance,
ardently examined,
with the refinement of the bodies that are frightened and flee
or the moon that is extinguished—suddenly,
perplexed before any catastrophe or collapse of the given,
the not given, also,
in that the spectral can assume, without much risk,
forms made that were already forms unmade and remade,
mountables/unmountables that speak their own account.
World in crisis,
peace only just converted into war or that converts frankly
into the battlefield of body against body
as enemies in love.
They destroy themselves
or rearm the fragments in a manner somehow distinct
from how they were shaped before,
with other orders of propriety in that which touches
the performance of the mirror in gathering the faces
lost in the night and protecting them,
gone bodies that live the otherness where the Other
reinvents itself and tries to explain the inexplicable fugue of the insane
that argues for their insanity as a form of loving
toward freezing regions where only the metal sounds
and moves the pivots,
scrapes the walls and dyes them a shadowy purple,
kissing bodies or drawing their pain among green death rattles
or the dead who return riding lazy butterflies.
They sound,
because everything sounds the twang of a lugubrious bell
or the pounding of factories that produce a thick silence
but great screams,
enormous clatterings that emerge from the vapor
that are consumed in the middle of the squeaking of bodies that battle
like ringing metal or thunder that elapses in the metals
when they turn deaf
and the bodies keep a ferocious silence because time runs
between the fog and smoke of ladies that talk and talk
and don’t allow the shadow to take the word or cough, even
or emit their opinion on the serious themes
that affect the bodies,
who remain quite dubious about the future
with certain resentful remorses that assault without pity
their pallid figures,
their elegant forms that conclude in something like that
like an alcohol unusually uncertain
in its alcoholic effects on the lover who falls into madness
without understanding the causes of the disaster that occasions
with so much meditating on profound love
where everything becomes crackling scaffolding
or wood damaged by an intense spiritual fever
that converts the bodies to sawdust and turns them
into a dark reddish color
that makes them stagger at the hour of climbing the stairs,
to descend to the precipice in which they execute the suicidal
the last attempts before giving
The Great Final Leap
from the trampoline that goes from existing to the tremendal of the void
beautifully ornamented with that which the Nothingness tries
explicating its disdain toward the things more or less full
and shaped in being part of an Everything that tends
to annihilate itself by its own excess.
(Everything is wood that burns and is consumed
in an atrocious persecution of the ash,
everything happens among inebriated metals and gravel,
among bodies fallen and collapsed
that leak in an exasperatingly slow way.)
The formless remains,
but bodies that resound leave without leaving,
respectively viewed, but not remaining fixed
in a time that neither heads nowhere
nor decides to have memories of nothing
or enchantment after the invention of the bodies.
Everything begins and ends at the same time
or finishes before it starts
or never begins but still ends
and is only a perpetual flow to the magenta
or a pondering focus that doesn’t learn to whisper
the name of the sacred things and the time that compresses it
in its old surgical tape
and there is a mortuary light that is exhausted in its internal collapse.
Time becomes industrialized
and there is a desperate man who runs through the streets
but never manages to catch up with its shadow
that
is not caught either
but still is destroyed on colliding with its other shadow
and invents its false apparition in
the mirrors.
that made of the falseness their only certainty.
(It will be necessary to leave,
even though there is no reason to have
to go.)
from Bodies One
Max Rojas
translated from the Spanish by Zane Koss and Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz
This is the first translation of Max Rojas to have appeared anywhere in English. The selection presented here includes the second and third of the twelve sections in the first volume of Rojas’s epic-length, late-career poem Cuerpos. Of this massive project, only the first six of a proposed twenty-four volumes were published before his death in 2015, leaving an incomplete project of a nonetheless staggering length—651 pages in the 2011 edition that collects the extant work. The sheer size of the poem presents a barrier to translation, especially as this substantiality recurs at every scale of the text. Any given sentence may trail off in accumulated subclauses for pages at a time, twisting down the left-hand margin according to Rojas’s own logic. Characterized by a palpable anxiety, Rojas’s poetics unfolds through the exuberant crafting of neologisms as he struggles against the forces of isolation and death that characterize life under capitalist modernity. This tendency poses one of the most difficult challenges in translating his work, as the decision to match his neologisms with others in English must also take into account the aural, etymological, and syntactic patterns of the originals. Certain neologisms, linking together several valences of sound and sense, remain impossible to render, though we aimed to capture the key intersecting meanings along with some of the palpable strangeness with which each such term imbues the text. In this regard, translating Rojas’s poetry can be seen as a plastic labor in language, giving similar aspect, texture, and dimension to the forms that he shaped with Spanish. Nonetheless, the highly Latinate diction of the original, which establishes a dialogue between the languages of critical theory and continental philosophy, between English and Spanish, enables a fluid translation process at times, even as references to the quotidian particulars of Mexico City life press against this sense of translatability.
Max Rojas is considered in Mexico to be a true poet’s poet, in addition to being a recognized essayist, literary critic, and novelist. Rojas was born in 1940 in Mexico City and studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. At eighteen, Rojas joined the Communist Party, beginning a life-long commitment to the labor movement. He also served as director of the Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky from 1994 to 1998. In 1971 he financed his first book of poetry, El turno del aullante, in a print run of 100 copies, later republished in 1983. In 1986, he published his second book of poems, Ser en la sombra, before falling silent for over twenty years. He re-emerged in the late 2000s with the first installments of Cuerpos. Rojas’s poetry was relatively unknown throughout most of his life, though his early writings were popular with members of the Infrarealist group, including Roberto Bolaño and Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. After Cuerpos received the Carlos Pellicer Iberoamerican Prize in Poetry in 2009, his singular style attained some notoriety, making him a more influential figure in contemporary Mexican poetry. Rojas died in 2015 at the age of 74.
Zane Koss is a settler Canadian raised on the unceded territories of the Ktunaxa and Secwépemc nations, and is currently a resident alien living in Brooklyn. He has published five chapbooks of poetry: site specificity (Simulacrum Press, 2020), The Odes (incomplete) and Invermere Grids (above/ground, 2019 and 2020), job site (Blasted Tree, 2018) and Warehouse Zone (PS Guelph, 2015). His writing and translations can be found or are forthcoming in tripwire, Denver Quarterly, the Chicago Review, the /temz/ Review, CV2, Poetry is Dead, and elsewhere. Koss is a doctoral candidate in the English Department at New York University, where he researches Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. poetry from the 1960s and 1970s.
Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz was born in Mexico City and lives in Chicago. He has published a chapbook, Undialogues (Girasol Press, 2014), and miscellaneous pieces in Chicago Review, Alba Londres, and La Tempestad. He is a Humanities Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and edits Chicago Review.
