The following essay investigates the indelible wounds of the 1973 Chilean coup—which brought to end the democratic socialist government of elected president Salvador Allende and marked the beginning of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorial regime. Seen through the fragmentary, poetic method of poet Carlos Soto Román’s collection, 11, Sarug Sarano examines the public role of the text as reflection, bringing pieces of recollection, ghostly testimonies, and sustaining structures to their archival and political context, ensuring that one does not forget about the terrors and erasure that continue to infiltrate the present.
I searched for you among the ruined, I spoke with you. What was left of you saw me and I held you.
—Raúl Zurita, “Song For His Disappeared Love” (tr. Anna Deeny Morales)
- On my desk, there is an old, cheap French edition of Descartes’ Discours de la méthode with an introduction by Paul Valéry. I bought it in a tiny bookstore in the Latin Quarter near the Jardin des Plantes, shortly before a poetry reading in which both Carlos Soto Román and I participated, and had never opened it until now—an occasion in which I am looking to improve my fading French. Within the first few pages, I had already found two objects of interest: a question and a dead insect. The question posed by Paul Valéry in his prologue says, “What have I read in the Discourse on the Method?” It is a convenient question to ask after reading a book, and a mandatory one before writing about it. A challenging work of art demands clarity, and it often reveals more about the reader than what the reader can possibly express about the work. So here I am, between my reading 11 by Carlos Soto Román in translation and my writing about it. The dead insect, possibly booklice, I fear, will come up at some point, as dead things do.
- What have I read in 11? The Chilean poet has effectively created a discourse on a method. By discourse I mean a poem, a textual device that runs through a particular set of psycho-historical contingencies. Regarding the method, it is not one devised by the poet himself that the poem considers; the text is not self-reflective. Rather, the poems run (not smoothly, for its course is anything but linear) through a method of power: in this case, it is the military dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet that ruled Chile for seventeen years, between September 11, 1973 and March 11, 1990. (Mind the pair of elevens opening and closing this tragic period.) The revelations of 11 occur through its structure—that is, the relationships between its constituting materials, the workings of said political method, and the systematic means by which it accomplishes its purpose, which immediately tells us something of public memory in Chile. What 11 sings is an assertation of the dictatorship’s symbolic architecture—some of it still standing, some of it turned into debris—and its continual ability to define, to a degree, the contours of Chile’s historical trauma. With every generation, the public archive must be remembered anew to reassert how it can be collectively accessed, and also to destroy whatever power past structures may still hold over public memory .
- Perhaps a Cartesian mistranslation of 11’s epigraph, the Arabic proverb: Memory is lost, writing endures, would be: We remember, therefore we must. Notice my choice of using first-person plural; I will come back to it. I suggest it because the epigraph has a strong imperative buried in its syntax. The faculty of memory is fickle by its very nature, even entropic; therefore, one must resort to technologies that oppose its loss. However, writing is liable to loss, too; it can be purposefully destroyed, concealed, or distorted to fit a privileged or imposed narrative. 11 runs in the opposite direction of the proverb. There is a significant mass of writing—an archive that has endured in propaganda, testimonials, the streets, and other media—that has been scattered, misremembered, and pushed into forgetfulness by the State. Half a century after the coup d’état, 11 delves fearlessly into the archive, carefully retrieves fragments, and reconfigures it into poetry to carry out the proverb’s tacit imperative. In fact, every page of the poem is charged with this political imperative, with a must, clear and loud. For example, when one comes upon these words, “First the legs, then the sexual organs, then the heart,” one cannot help but experience a scale of negative emotions, and finally ask: what must I do? Other textual artifacts might have produced more passive questions such as, “How did this happen?” But the poetry in 11 is a call to action, not an act of lamentation. 11 is not a moralizing work; it will neither define your idea of right or wrong nor instruct your behavior, as some would have it, but it will state through poetry a fact of memory, and let the reader do the rest.
- In his introduction, Valéry considers that Descartes’ method should have been named egotism, since it has freed the I and the Me (le Je et le Moi) from the “scholastic architecture” of medieval philosophy. 11 aligns itself with a transnational constellation of poetic works that have subverted documents and archives, processing them into poetry through various techniques. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, and Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust (this latter title obsessed Soto Román to the degree that he translated it into Spanish) are among the works belonging to this non-Cartesian tradition. Contrarily, 11 has not only removed the Cartesian pronouns still dominating contemporary lyric poetry, but has substituted the central act of writing-as-creation for that of selecting, transforming, and displacing from existing historical sources. Furthermore, the traditional, authorial mediation strategy of the discrete lyrical unit—with its title, stanzas, and lines—has been annulled. Instead, a series of procedures that include lists, charts, illustrations, erasures, slogans, and diagrams reveal existing relations, oppressive and complicit, between different sectors of Chilean society during and after the dictatorship.
- It has become something of a ritual to cite Walter Benjamin in translation criticism. Not meaning to go against such venerable tradition, for every discipline has its unacknowledged liturgy, I will proceed to cite Benjamin in extenso. In his fragment “Excavation and Memory,” Benjamin observes that “[l]anguage has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.” The metaphor of excavation is appropriate insofar as it provides a precise image of the poet’s modus operandi: Soto Román digging into the “dark loam” of Chilean historical memory in search of his poetic material. Elaborating upon this picture, 11 rather reads as if the reader is going down the excavated tunnels—where it gets hard to breathe and see—instead of just enjoying, on the safe surface, the mineral ore the poet has brought from the depths.
- I’m thinking of an unmediated, disembodied phrase on one of the pages of 11: “Do you shoot, or I shoot?”, and how it is the contest slogan for one of the games in the shows of Don Francisco, the famous Chilean television presenter. In the segment, the contestant is given three pistols. I’m thinking of how in 11, that line becomes indistinguishable from the language of a soldier or a businessman. I’m thinking of how it is fully articulated by violence, and how Don Francisco, in a YouTube video, describes it as a “highly successful,” even “iconic” contest. I’m thinking of how the show was a cog in the dictatorial machinery, feeding entertainment to the masses, and neatly playing its part in upholding the regime. 11 remind us that under authoritarianism, laughs become indistinguishable from screams.
- Latin American literature has a long tradition of the so-called dictator novel, tracing its origins to Facundo, an essay published in 1845 by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento—although, as Gerald Martin accurately observes, its roots are to be found in the historiographic works describing the rule of Hernán Cortés. Chile has developed its own rich tradition confronting the years of the dictatorship and its afterlives, including Roberto Bolaño’s novella By Night in Chile, the poetry of Raúl Zurita and Carmen Berenguer, and Pablo Larraín’s recent horror satire, El Conde, to name a few. However, I am interested in how 11 also subverts this tradition. The poem eschews the literary portrayal of the dictator and refuses to privilege a single perspective, giving us instead, as mentioned above, a multiplicity of views and voices. The poem is a discourse on the style of late twentieth century military dictatorship, its chilling precision; the textual procedures inflicted upon its sources—erasure, fragmentation, dislocation, precision, extreme repetition—mirrors the method of authoritarianism, an egotism of the most monstruous kind.
- I must refer now to Heimrad Bäcker’s Documentary Poetry, which Soto Román translated into Spanish: “National socialism made use of an alphabet of continually recurring formulas.” This observation can very well be applied to the Pinochet regime’s use of language, and such formulas become evident in I suspect the greatest virtue of 11 lies not in the exposure of “language as bureaucratic act of violence,” but in reminding us of the need to remain vigilant to contemporary iterations of formulaic dehumanization, which nowadays has taken over social media. 11 includes the formula of a chemical weapon which causes death “as a result of asphyxia due to the inability to control the muscles involved in breathing.” This is yet again another instance in which the poem exposes the State’s obsession with method, with the ability to reproduce dehumanizing results at ever larger scales and faster speeds, to ensure its hold on power.
- How many more will there be?. . . Now I am listening to “Estadio Chile,” the last poem of Víctor Jara, the legendary Chilean singer-songwriter, sung in English by Pete Seeger. Jara wrote it on a borrowed notebook before being brutally tortured and murdered by Pinochet soldiers right after the coup d’état. All with gazes fixed on death. . . His body was found four days later with forty-four bullet wounds. Today, the soccer stadium where he was shot bears the name of the martyr. The military carry out their plans with precision. . . Blood is medals for them. In 11, blank spaces speak as much as printed text; they seem to be the places where you can hear the dead whispering songs, whispering names and numbers that must not be forgotten. O you song, you come out so badly when I must sing – the terror!
- Such a complex array of sources and procedures certainly poses a challenge to translation. 11 was translated by a team of eight translators: Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Jèssica Pujol Duran, Patrick Greaney, and Robin Myers. Thomas Rothe, in his excellent afterword, writes: “We saw fit to address [the ethical and aesthetic complexities of translating documentary poetics] through a collaborative translation effort.” I have written elsewhere on the complexities of this particular poetics, since there is already a layer of translation at work even before its rendering into another language; that is, by selecting, editing, transposing, and altering found sources into a poetic context, the poet has already done an act of translation, if intralingual. The diverse translation team has done a remarkable job at sustaining the balance between the polyphony of sources and the cohesiveness that a work like 11 demands, and they were right to avoid publishing a bilingual edition. Their success invites other translators to explore collaboration and collectivity as a powerful possibility. In addition, it is especially important for a work like 11 to be published in English, because of the major role the United States played in the Chilean coup d’état. More than forty years after the coup, amid ongoing genocides, a work like 11 is urgent.
- 11, eleven, once in Spanish. Once, this eleven happened; may it never do so again. May the martyrs of yesterday and today be not shriveled booklice in the pages of history, but an indelible, burning ink.
Sarug Sarano is a poet, translator, and editor based in Monterrey, Mexico. He translated Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony into Spanish and is currently translating poetry by Louis Zukofsky and Jena Osman.
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