from Fall of the Tightrope Walker

Czar Gutiérrez

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B E L O W
T H E L U N A R
S H A D O W (T H A T W A V E S)







               T H E H A Z Y B R I G H T O F T H E W A T E R S

               She lets her beauty drip on the wellspring
               Sweetly she hums below the waving lunar shadow,
               silvering 

               [She describes the trajectory of a feather that gently falls upon a nest]

               SHE: two fine strokes and one brief
               Her brilliant skin
               At times, her delicate tongue leaves behind a kiss: that intense bright on both lips

               I handed her a beer
               —Drink—I said
               I drew the glass closer, folding to receive her lips

               And inside the delicate filigree (that pulverizes)
I swing
               I navigate each fold and I swing

               —I want to be fresh mouth,
calm water,
               At times, only rhythm

               (The breeze extracts nectar from the dawn)

               —Can you see? Through the mouth of the volcano, the sun’s red redness shows

               [She submerges her eyes in the glistening luminosity of the Universe]

               —Let us nail a steady point that shall be the planets’ center of rotation



               And—between the sunlit room and the secret one—they take flight, below the lunar shadow that waves, silvering.







               P L A I N O F T H E M O O N

               The moon advances toward the blue hoop

               Immersed in its yellow hair, she goes red
               She sheds her skin and goes red

               She receives the sliding star

               She (sweet chrysalis that blooms in every blast)
touches the sky—blue ring
and a light grows on her fingertips

               A light like a sword that opens and shines and
spills juice

               Lets loose her beautiful, expansive wave

               And a thin film of wax—fever—covers that fine line that separates the edge of her skin from the Universe

               Blue
               Foamy and molecular
               She was of space: of snow.







               [P R A Y E R]

               Today I have lain under the moon and a deep rhythm runs through me

               Today I have immersed myself once more in her smooth, amber, or delicate light—surface of clarities at the center of which a beam is crushed, explodes, or groans

               Today immense as an animal that opens up its gut and fans the fire. Yet now enveloped in flames, I gaze at his high image inhabited with stars. I feel the shard of glass travel under my skin—oh fearful, exploring diaspora—and a potency as of an artery or a wire that with great tension disturbs and spreads the bloody range: I write

               I write to you, liquid female, captive lighting, arrow that guides and dissolves my left hand

              And look, life is like this: I who have been suspended describing the ellipse, the undulating movement of our bodies—an immense fluid that rides bluely sustained—; I who have raised everything to a high symbol, far from ice and storm—on the star of fire that melts—, as now I arch myself and, finally covered in lighting or madness, perceive your return: from a cloud of glass—that shatters—a blue fragment falls

              My love: I caress the moon that shines between my fingers while bidding goodbye to the golden claw that crosses your heart.

translated from the Spanish by Marta del Pozo and Nicholas Rattner

Read the original in Spanish

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk writes, “To be modern is one who contests ever having been on the inside.” As an alternative to interiority, Sloterdijk proposes a relational mode of being in or being with the world, and, describing the nature of our relation, writes, “Individuals do not exist except as particles or as poles of spheres; all that exists are only couples and their extensions.” For Sloterdijk, ontology starts with the number two, so two is the beginning of being, and a relationship between two people is the first mode of existence.

The poems in Czar Gutiérrez’s La caída del equilbrista (Fall of the Tightrope Walker) can be read as the fall of man, as the breaking or implosion of the first sphere, which is the sphere of the Father. The book is an existential quest to reconnect with this Father figure (we could say this is the subject´s own psychic principle) as well as his female companion, and, on a cosmic level, it is a search for what Octavio Paz´s epigraph at the beginning of the book announces: a fraternity over the abyss. In Sloterdijk’s vocabulary, it is a sphereological search in a space of psychic resonance.

While translating Czar’s remarkable poems, we have immersed ourselves in Sloterdijk’s relation theories and discovered a strong resonance between his philosophy and the act of collective translation, which has taught us a great deal about the tuning of psyches in search of a word, a text, or even a poem that simultaneously resonates within two spheres. Fraternity and solidarity are, therefore, key words for a sphereological interpretation of collective translation.

We believe that analytical comprehension happens at all times, especially when one enters the realm of language, art, or poetry, when there is the common objective of privileging the original force which is the text, when the subject/object relationship is totally dissolved, and all that remains is an event, a text emerging through our tongues, which we consider not to be the infallible organs of speech, but those psychic principles that allow for wordless understanding. 

Our sphereology has been infused by what the poetic “I” in The Fall of the Tightrope Walker says at one point during his fall: “I want to be fresh mouth, / calm water, / At times, only rhythm.”

Czar Gutiérrez was born in 1968 in Arequipa. He is among the most important inventors of the last fifty years of Peruvian literature. Between 1983 and 1988 he studied philosophy at the Universidad Católica de Santa Maria (1983–1988) before becoming a rock journalist and underground DJ. La caída del equilibrista (Fall of the Tightrope Walker), Guiterrez’s first poetry collection, was published in 1997 and republished in 2012. Between 2003 and 2005, he camped out at Ground Zero in New York City in order to write 80M84RD3R0, an innovative novel structured in the form of a countdown. It was published in three volumes by Grupo Editorial Norma in Colombia. The novel received international acclaim and has been partially translated into English and French. Gutiérrez is also the author of the poetry collection Josefina (Hueso Húmero, 2012). Currently, he spends his time on a remote island in the South Pacific.

Marta del Pozo holds a Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an M.F.A. in creative writing from NYU. She teaches Spanish literature at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. As a poet, she received the accesit for her book of poems La memoria del pez (2008) and has won the Antonio Gala International Poetry Prize for her manuscript Hambre de Imágenes (2015). Her book Escuela de Geómetras is also forthcoming. With Nicholas Rattner, she has received an NEA award to translate into English Yvan Yauri's book of poems Viento de fuego (Fire Wind, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011) and has also translated into Spanish the poetry of Richard Jackson, Robert Bringhurst, and Leonard Schwartz. She is the editorial director at Quantum Prose.

Nicholas Rattner holds a master's in English literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a former basketball journalist and editor for Ugly Duckling Presse. Currently, he teaches English at Holyoke Community College.