Selected in 2017 as one out of thirty-nine most promising Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine, acclaimed Mexican writer Daniel Saldaña París is no stranger to our pages—read our review of his “exquisite” novel, Ramifications, for a start. This Translation Tuesday, we introduce to our readers another facet of Saldaña París, with a curious aviation-themed poem from the collection La máquina autobiográfica rendered in Louis Sanger’s translation. Curious because nothing takes flight: the poem’s airports are empty, its turbines are violent. What soars instead is the poem’s dynamic syntax which zigzags through a word’s widening valences, where Saldaña París defamiliarises for us the everyday uses of the word and the world. There is no timelier moment than today to reconsider what we know of the poem’s titular space.
Airports
(1)
Empty airports.
Themselves, I mean.
But also: with hundreds.
Hundreds who could.
Or could have been, but weren’t.
Airports themselves, no?
containing all times.
What is there to say about “grain of the voice”—seed:
say the truth
about the unsaid. (Listen.)
For example, a voice that sows fields of sorghum
in front of
unorganized fields:
cities seen from above.
The plane does what it has to, like I said,
better late, even late in the day
with a sun that sets this late:
all I love
is visible, and growing old.
(2)
Turbines made to disturb the native
—on horseback
caught between one era and another—.
Modernity, why have you abandoned me?
(Note for later:
discourses which use the word “cock”:
poultry farming, pornography,
people who pretend—fools—to hate their neighbour.)
(It’s already later: is it the time
to return to my own footsteps
of the preceding parenthetical?
There’s no way of knowing: this
never stops.)
What I was saying:
turbines made to kill a bull.
Marinetti, in raptures, rides one of them (on horseback
between one era and another).
Other bulls:
Picasso’s,
Botero’s (insults),
the bull of the brand that uses a bull as branding.
Branding: that which betrays.
And also: the impression one body leaves on another.
Turbines to kill time.
Translated from the Spanish by Louis Sanger
Daniel Saldaña París (b. Mexico City, 1984) is a poet, essayist, and novelist. In 2007, he won the Jaime Reyes Prize for Young Poets. In 2012, he published a collection of poems titled La máquina autobiográfica. Both of his novels—Among Strange Victims (En medio de extrañas víctimas, 2013) and Ramifications (El nervio principal, 2020)—were published in English by Coffee House Press. In 2021, Anagrama published a collection of his essays titled Aviones sobrevolando un monstruo. He has been a fellow at Union des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois, the Omi International Arts Center, The Banff Centre, and The MacDowell Colony. He has been published by BOMB!, Guernica, LitHub.com, Electric Literature, The Guardian, El País, and on KCRW’s Unfictional. In 2020, he received the Eccles Centre & Hay Festival Writers Award in the UK.
Louis Sanger is a settler Canadian based in Toronto. He attended McGill University in Montreal, where he completed a BA in Hispanic studies and English literature. In 2019, he spent a semester studying Latin American literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His own writing has been published in various campus magazines and journals across Canada. As a translator, he primarily works with Mexican poetry and short fiction.
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