For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you two poems by the Chilean writer Víctor Hugo Ortega C. Rendered here in plain but powerful English by Georgina Fooks, the poems are striking in their restraint; the first is blunt, almost disinterested, and the second is so sparing in its references to emotion that what little appears—a look of surprise recalled on a lover’s face, a mocking word spoken long ago—is almost unbearable. The collection from which these poems are taken is in fact named for a line in the second poem: the Amantes de cartón, or Cardboard Lovers, of the final stanza—an image suggesting not only the futility of the lovers to understand each other, but of literature to capture the narrator’s loss.
The eye of Santiago
The eye of Santiago
gazes with polluted indifference
at the romance of lovers polluted
by high rates
of heartbreak.
Two thousand one hundred and ninety
I’ll see you and you won’t see me
I’ll speak to you and you won’t hear me
we’ll breathe in the same enclosed space
and maybe you won’t realise,
look where we happened to meet
you’re going to the 49th floor
me to the 45th,
50 seconds—is this how long this journey will last?
It’ll depend on if someone gets in,
although I don’t think so,
we always used to get lucky.
I’m not going to think
about whether there’ll be a technical fault
and we’ll be trapped,
no,
it would be like the scene in Nine Queens,
your favourite film,
my favourite film,
can you imagine the look on your face?
I can picture it
it would be that look of surprise
that I liked to see,
like the time an earthquake tremor hit us
in the early hours
and you looked at me stunned,
maybe you don’t even remember.
What are you going to do on the 49th floor?
You’re not dressed like an office worker
at least not for this building,
surely you’re going to pick something up or drop it off,
I’m here to get a cheque,
once a year I cross the city
to make it here.
Do you remember when we crossed the city
on those old yellow buses?
We had a good time,
there was no Transantiago back then.
You know, I’m still fast,
you’d barely come in when I spotted you,
your hair is longer than I remember,
straighter too,
it looks good on you.
The shirt you’re wearing
reminds me of the shirt you wore that time,
the last time we saw each other,
could it be the same one?
People always have that special thing
they wear for a long time,
like my black windbreaker with the cap.
The one you said
I would wear to bed if I could,
I still have it,
still wear it.
How many years has it been,
six, seven, eight?
I don’t know why I’m pretending,
I know perfectly well it’s been six.
I ask for help from my phone calculator
to know that 365 times by 6 is 2190,
2190 days I haven’t seen you,
2190 days that I’ve had to look at you
in the past.
And here I am now,
looking at your back
in a lift.
I see you and you don’t see me,
I speak to you and you don’t hear me,
I’m about to get off,
I’ll pass by your side,
I’ll leave the lift
and time will keep passing.
Surely they’ll keep asking me
what became of you.
And I’ll reply that we don’t talk any more,
but one time
we met
in a lift in the Torre Titanium,
maybe I’ll lie
and say we said hi.
Do they ask the same of you?
Before I left
it occurred to me
that you recognised me too
and you’re talking to me in your head.
That you’re also asking yourself
why I’m going to the 45th floor,
it’ll be a mystery,
I’ll never know.
I saw you and you didn’t see me,
I spoke to you and you didn’t hear me,
the doors open
and I remember
when we were at a bus stop
in Plaza Italia
and we mocked each other
saying we knew nothing about love,
that we were cardboard lovers,
maybe it was true,
as true as the fact that falling out of love
is meeting each other six years later
in a lift
and we’re just strangers.
Translated from the Spanish by Georgina Fooks
Víctor Hugo Ortega C. was born in Malloco, Chile, in 1982. He is a journalist, university professor and cultural critic. He has published three short story collections and two poetry collections, all in Spanish. His short story collection, Elogio del Maracanazo, has been published in Chile, Mexico, Uruguay and Brazil, and is currently being translated into Italian and English. He has twice received the Fondo Nacional de Fomento del Libro y la Lectura (National Fund for the Promotion of Reading and Literature) awarded by the Chilean Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage, for his short stories in 2021 and his poetry in 2024. He was a finalist in the 11th Teresa Hamel National Short Story Contest 2021, organised by the Society of Writers of Chile (SECH). He writes on Latin American film, literature and culture for the Uruguayan magazine Sujetos. The collection from which these poems were taken, Amantes de cartón, was published by Visceras in 2019.
Georgina Fooks is a writer and translator based in England. She is the Director of Outreach at Asymptote, and her writing and translations have been published in Asymptote, Hopscotch Translation and The Oxonian Review. She studied poetry translation at the BCLT Summer School in 2022 and is currently completing a doctorate in Latin American literature at Oxford, specialising in Argentine poetry.