Gonzalo, a poet and university lecturer, and Carla, an aspiring photographer, were high school sweethearts who allowed each other that first, ever-elusive sexual experience. They break up and reunite nine years later, and Carla has a kid in tow. Although Gonzalo takes an active role in raising Vicente (he thinks it’s a beautiful challenge), he hesitates before answering the cashier who asks, upon seeing Gonzalo and Vicente together, what they are to each other. “Friends,” Gonzalo finally says. Afterward, he consults the dictionary. Is he a padrastro—stepfather in Spanish? And is Vicente his hijastro, given that Gonzalo and Carla have never married?
No Spanish word that ended with the suffix -astro meant or could ever mean anything other than contempt or illegitimacy. The calamitous suffix -astro “forms nouns with pejorative meanings,” said the RAE Dictionary: musicastro, politicastro: inept musician, unskilled politician. The same source defines the word poetastro simply as “bad poet.”
Then, Gonzalo imagines Vicente telling his friends, “My padrastro is a poetastro.” This statement reflects Gonzalo’s insecurity toward both fatherhood and poetry: two ventures at which he wants to excel, but he has so much love for their subjects (Vicente and poems), that no herculean effort from him could ever bring a wholly satisfying outcome.
Who becomes a father? Or rather, how does one become a father? This is one of the central questions the novel tackles. One day, Gonzalo and Carla visit Carla’s grandfather, an octogenarian who sired more than twenty children with numerous women he couldn’t keep track of. The grandfather is known for “seducing and impregnating women left and right,” as if that “was a well-regarded method of proving one’s manliness.” Carla’s mother rarely saw her biological father, from whose seed her life had sprouted. Similarly, Vicente’s biological father, Leon, makes only a cameo appearance in his son’s life. No wonder Gonzalo is attracted to the Mapuche word chau, which designates “the mother’s companion, no matter if he’s the biological father or not. Chau is the name of a function, the father-function.” Regardless of the presence of any blood-relationship, it is the service provided for that function that bestows the honorable label “father” on a man.
Hence, the most endearing aspect of the novel resides in Gonzalo’s well-intentioned yet haphazard love for Vicente, and how Gonzalo’s passionate love affair with poetry is passed on to Vicente, unbeknownst to both. In fact, it is not only in this father–son relationship but also in the relationships between Gonzalo and Carla, and between Vicente and Pru (Vicente’s love interest), that poetry and love in various shapes create opportunities for bonding and the strengthening of ties. The intersection of familial and literary lives is infused with heartrending drama.
As the title suggests, the story is heavily populated with Chilean poets and poems: characters express their affection by reciting poetry to one another; an American journalist writes an article about the milieu of Chilean poetry by interviewing everyday poets; and poems, including both those composed by the characters and by Chilean poets of immortal status such as Gabriela Mistral and Gonzalo Millán, are printed verbatim. The book explores the multitudinous roads a life driven by a love of poetry can travel.
Zambra has often played and experimented with formal techniques. Tthe most ingenious case is his novel Multiple Choice, which is laid out in the format of the Chilean college entrance exam. His story collection, My Documents (tr. Megan McDowell, Granta, 2017), is given the rough and spontaneous feel of neglected files in a computer’s “My Documents” folder, playfully imbuing a kind of verisimilitude. His novels Bonsai (tr. Carolina De Robertis, Melville House, 2008) and Ways of Going Home (tr. Megan McDowell, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) both manifested a stories-within-stories form, like Russian dolls. Metafictional aspects of his stories often endow the prose with a downright feeling of autofiction, especially in books that touch on childhood experiences during the Pinochet dictatorship.
On the flip side, in Chilean Poet, the third-person narration is rather straightforward, without any of his trademark metafictional byways. However, an “I” appears slyly—as if by accident—in the text, like a Freudian slip, and it becomes apparent that Zambra himself is telling this made-up story. Consequently, the novel is at once an emotionally resonant story about human relationship, and the procedural depiction of writing a novel about Chilean poets. The narrator confesses, “ . . . because Vicente is a Chilean poet and I am a Chilean novelist, and we Chilean novelists write novels about Chilean poets.” This trope becomes another kind of experiment that successfully plays itself out in a narrative that seems at first glance a very traditional tale.
The novel begins a couple of years after the 1988 Chilean national referendum (dynamically portrayed in the movie No by Pablo Larraín, which is mentioned in the novel along with numerous other cultural references from both North and South America). Chilean teenagers, along with their parents, are struggling to find their place in their country’s burgeoning democracy. Although Gonzalo diligently pursues his dream, even publishing a book of poems (albeit having to contribute 40 percent of the publishing fee), he realizes one day that he will never be a great poet: “He still aspired to some imprecise sort of relevance, and his love of poetry remained intact, but he no longer dreamed of becoming a Pablo Neruda or a Pablo de Rokha or a Nicanor Parra, or even, let’s say, an Óscar Hahn or a Claudio Bertoni: he aspired to be considered a good poet, that’s all.” But what defines a great poet is another question the novel tries to untangle.
The second part of the novel begins when Vicente, now eighteen years old, meets Pru, thirty-one, an American journalist who is lost in Chile. She is in search of a topic for an article when Vicente’s friend, another Chilean poet named Pato, tells her that, “In Chile we have beautiful views and good wine, but for me personally, the best is the poetry. It’s the only really good thing about Chile.” Pru begins interviewing a cadre of Chilean poets and slowly unspools a narrative created by the beautiful mosaic of Chilean lives steeped in poetry. Some interview subjects include: Chaura Paillacar, who writes with a perennial headache; Aurelia Bala, who writes with both hands, penning two disparate poems at once; Floridor Perez, who named his son Chile; Hernaldo Bravo, who writes incessant poems from a hospital bed; and ninety-nine-year old Nicanor Parra, who claims that his longevity owes to the fact that he consumed his mother’s milk until he was ten. Pru’s research ends in a wild party with freewheeling poets who drink and fight over conflicting tastes in poetry. All in all, poetry blooms as something inherently mysterious, inexplicable, multivarious, and life-giving. Vicente and Pato, when assisting Pru on her quest to interview Chilean poets, are referred to as savage detectives: “You guys are like Bolaño characters,” Pru tells them. In fact, Bolaño, whose name is frequently mentioned in the novel, has written in his essay collection Between Parentheses, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Picador, 2016):
The picture I have of Chilean poetry is like my memory of my first dog, Duke, a mongrel who was part St. Bernard, German shepherd, and Alsatian. He lived with us for many years, and when I was lonely he was like father, mother, teacher, and brother all in one. To me, Duke is Chilean poetry.
The wayward diversity and total embrace of life represent Chilean poetry. Pru writes in her article that Chilean poetry seems like “an immense family, with great-grandparents and second cousins, with people who live in a gigantic palafito.”
Translating Chilean Poet must have been a unique challenge for Megan McDowell, since she had to strategically translate poems written by fictional characters themselves and conversations in which two different languages are spoken. (McDowell seldom resorts to leaving Spanish untranslated if a dialogue is happening between an English speaker and a Spanish speaker, allowing the readers to experience the language barrier along with the characters in conversation). Some poems have the additional translation challenge of postmodern traits such as blank spacing and fragmented language. In certain verses, McDowell leaves a few words, especially Spanish articles, untranslated, as in the case of these poems written by Vicente, and recited by Vicente to Gonzalo:
You say una freckle
una scar
una rain shower
una drop
But
Un leak
Or
A fingernail (she) and nail clippers (he)
A bottle (she) and its opener (he)
But a foot (he) and a kick (also he)
La night and la midnight
El day and el midday
But la shadow and el sun.
Regardless, both Zambra’s straightforward prose and his experimental poems all read naturally, thanks to McDowell’s astute translation.
Reuniting with an eighteen-year-old Vicente after six years, Gonzalo sees that Vicente is headlong in love with poetry. “When he finds out that his stepson or ex-stepson writes poems, Gonzalo feels a kind of pang or shudder he wouldn’t know whether to describe it as a jolt of warmth or a shiver.” This encounter leads Gonzalo to mull over whether his life thus far has been a success or a failure. He has always prided himself for getting into the best college in Chile, attaining a Ph.D. in New York, and becoming a professor. Now, he realizes that life’s success should be judged not by material or social status but by one’s relationship with other human beings, by how much love and attention one has given to others. Hence, he resents the years he spent away from Vicente, although he consistently sent emails until Carla cold-heartedly asked him not to confuse her son by keeping contact. What he particularly missed was “the overwhelming joy of being important to someone.” Because he left all his poetry books with Carla after their separation, he has imparted, even in his absence, the love of poetry to Vicente, which helps them connect again when they meet. Gonzalo is a good father, who has always been ready to serve a “father-function” for his now ex-stepson and paid attention to his paternal conscience.
Far into the night, Gonzalo and Vicente recite poems to each other, just like Gonzalo had done for Carla when they were teenagers. Then the “I” interrupts again to end the story, a story full of poems “that prove poetry is good for something, that words can wound, throb, cure, console, resonate, remain.” These verbs describe all the reasons we continue to read great novels like Chilean Poet.
