Trans-Siberian Prose

Juan Carreño

the grinding of your teeth was
the chugging of the train, iron wheels
sheering ice, squishing vermin

sherbet sparks flying on the rails
the grinding of your teeth is Siberia, Juana
and it’ll lead us to Port Hardy

I was just sixteen and such a poor poet
the maps gleaming beneath the sheets
as porn glints through dreams

cathedral bells tolling in the rain
boggy paths for my boots to sink in
and all the paths and all the railway lines

all the electric cables were a road to nowhere
a vortex and a summons, to me, to love
I’m prepared to sell pencils

calendars of pilgrimage sites
of naked women spreading legs
wide around watermelons

I’ll do whatever it takes
to have seen the last of my family
of the central valleys, of drudgery

gruff men toiling and tilling
and I grabbed my fever, my backpack, canned food
from my mother’s larder

and I spat on the portraits of my forebears
pissed on my father’s tools and I left
but the stations were empty

and I found myself sixteen thousand miles from home
at the age of just sixteen
such a poor poet, and a worse drinker still

and I said to myself as I strode into winter
as one who steps into a morgue
I know my friends are dying far from here

you got on at Sonora, Juana
with the other stragglers hellbent
on never seeing another Chilean

I was just sixteen and such a poor poet
I didn’t know how to get to the bottom of things
the first night we drank together you said

I’ve just cut and run from a shoot
with thrush and a gash to show for it
and crossing Henderson, Death Valley, Sacramento

I tried to look after you, procure ointments
I was drunk for more than a thousand miles
watching you sleep, my cigarettes tracing

passing stations looming up like the dead
for the train never stops and the people expire
on the fogged up windows

and as dusk fell over the mountains
you said, cry, make me wet
with the spit of your tears

at Medford your hair whipped across your face
and I saw you laugh, you said
this engine fault’s a godsend

let’s go to Bear Creek bank to drink
and fuck on the sand
sorry for staining your back

I like you staining me
I’ll remember you better this way
and the screeching of the rails on the snow

as I tried to write at night
writing Juana I’d stop in my tracks
and wank

hollowing out as night flew past the window
Winchester Bay, Waldport and tiny lights
in the distance—farms?—hopeless homes

we drank ourselves to sleep naked on the floor
those mornings of perpetual motion
buffered by the grinding of your teeth

of an embrace in your bunk
waking in the nape of your neck yawning
tell me, Blaise, are we far from La Pintana?

yes, we’re very far from the pyramids
and the petroglyphs, the statues
the hordes of tourist gold

we’re in Oil City now and I’m still in freefall
landscapes untrammelled by presence
storms fattened on Donoso and Arlt

and as for you, Juana, every day
you open the door to my sleeper car
ply me with ham and spirit dregs

half-drunk in pilfered minibar bottles
look, we’re in Tin City already
that there is the Chukchi Sea

would you like to live here?

I’m sure no one would find us

we could start a lettuce patch in the ice
 
 

translated from the Spanish by Maya Feile Tomes

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to the original read by the author:

The idea to translate this poem was born one warm Pyrenean evening in autumn 2021 at the Residència Faberllull in Catalonia, when Chilean poet Juan Carreño offered a spontaneous reading of some pieces from his latest collection, Paramar (2019). As we were a multilingual crowd, I was invited to extemporise on-the-spot interpretations into English for the group, including of the meandering, multi-page poem that is “prosa del Transiberiano”. Although the translation now committed to paper here is almost certainly different in every regard, even that inchoate first effort contained within it the seeds of a sense that the poem was to have a whole new journey ahead of it in English. Carreño’s poetry is raw, teetering on the knife-edge between tenderness and poor taste and leading the reader on a precarious yet finely calibrated journey along that same delicate line. This signature blend of tenderness and tawdriness is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than here in “Trans-Siberian Prose”, a lengthy coming-of-age poem in which the narrator is confronted with the reality of eroticism, escapism and fragile human fellowship in the teeth of uncertain, at times unsavoury, circumstances. It is a poem that seems strung out along an interminable skyline along which it nonetheless inexorably advances, and the challenge—first as interpreter, later as translator—was to sustain the momentum of the poem as it chugs its way along its own narrative arc towards its enigmatic conclusion. At times it is almost soporific in effect, with its railroad rhythms and endlessly receding horizon, yet shot through with jarring content that ambushes us around the corner and jolts us rudely awake. Its oral roots resurge. In a sense, then, it is only right that this translation began life in oral form, for Juan’s is above all a poetry—and a poetics—of orality.

Juan Carreño is one of the fiercest voices to have emerged from contemporary Santiago de Chile, uncompromising in his commitment to bringing the rawer sides of Chilean society to wider literary attention. His work spans poetry, prose, spoken word and beyond; titles include the poetry collection Compro fierro (Lagartija Ediciones, 2007), the novel Budnik (Cinosargo Ediciones, 2016) and the series of pieces gathered together as Neozona (Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2020). He has also made a number of short films. His most recent collection of poetry is Paramar (Ediciones Lastarria, 2019), from which this piece is taken. He lives in La Pintana.

Maya Feile Tomes is a lecturer and translator based in Cambridge, UK, but with an eye always to the Southern Cone. She has published translated (and indeed untranslated) pieces in various academic presses and was longlisted in the John Dryden Translation Competition in 2019. She and Juan met at the Residència Faberllull in Olot, Catalonia, and would both like to record their gratitude to the organisers for the opportunity. Currently, Maya is working on a translation of Martín Rejtman’s Madrid es una mierda (Barrett, 2018), and has most recently completed a sixteenth-century piece for Oxford University Press.