i live day by day given that i shouldn’t take any chances
i measure the street with my stride and with hands salty with sweat
i count each minute when i was at the point of dying
i want to find the trees in the same place as before
that’s me i’m scared i love the rain i take care of myself like a good
manager who knows how to supervise his years
my head against sleep protects me from the sun
i live day by day read the papers climb the headlines like a bug
up a tourist’s skull
i make my way through the crowd rippling daily
lazy beast i close my eyes and say carnivorous tunnel without missing a syllable
car horns greet me and i say murder victim cave is your mouth prepared
for funerals
i go into buildings with no exits any day
magisterial concrete jungle surrounds me at that moment
when a door opens to close another
i am marked down lose weight and height and i’ve told myself
juan come down from the top floor
and i decide not to jump show-off laughable in these times
since living through them is an enormous venture
and i laugh first but won’t be the last
and i laugh last being the first
i laugh out of fearpanic and canine hunger when the city
digests all its victims
dreaming but unable to sleep
and sleeping but unable to dream
and like an inexpert bull nape hanging in the slaughterhouse
my impolite gaze always willing to empty like a wine glass
me methodic man tedious king in his home i ask for mercy i ask for mercy
i see me i see me in my childhood in my adulthood
in my death in the terms of my profession as a spectator hardened
by the wall for always
i see me in my furious salamander cornea
i see me in the urban jungle it suggests a mask
to say good morning from an impossibly high skylight
i see me in the darkness where i no longer see me and in the midmost
of my happiness coded by the spoils of misery it stabs me in the eye
i see me on the bench of a dark prison and in the matter
ossifying my eyelids and diluting my new cranium
which is nothing more than this sheet strengthening
in search of a support point in my kneecap
the sudden appearance of puss inseminating the beautiful gardens
of a nighttime dispensary
my eyelids no vengeance my eyelids no origin my eyelids
no points of exit to sing to spill praises in ice floes
of internal fortune my eyelids closed always to see the dark side
of flesh
like worms rotting my hatreds
i see me
i see me in my childhood in my adulthood in my death
hitting the abyss between my spirit and me are my suits
my minutes are written up raised the walls of a luciola thickness
which I admit to not knowing like the violent tissue of chromosomes
the bland abysses being embedded in my body
made of cosmogonic lava matter and nerve
of domestic convulsion
of friendly tumor in the shape of a medicinal crater
a substance made of corpuscles of daily existence
provided with the time needed for each pulsation
and each one of them is at the same time an atom
an angel a work of art a human being
a god of thick solar mane
i am aware of this equilibrium daily
of a bow dangerously drawn
to which i am sentenced by an idea on the verge of being shot
with bad manners i am your internal and external appearance
your true being your virus your extreme unction
the cannibal i become
without waiting long in shiny parks
i debase myself for no reason
i debase myself for nothing i debase myself faster than hate
which acts under the effects of corrosive acid
i make your suit my best mask
i show you a rose inside a volcano
i drink to practice my aim at the boa scales
in sum i find i’m running late i’ve lost my days
there isn’t a difference between potency and desire between desire
and act between act and crime
i flee my ancestors i find them everywhere
in the history volumes in my shirts in the table varnish
and on the table itself in the open lobe parentheses
in butcher shops in dogs of prey in bunches of flowers
on page 4
the magma must return the world like a room
too alone where i admire the volcanoes
the exact recess of their lavas over a luxury spa
i have sold my angel
i have killed it with a clumsy knife unwashed
what is invisible has blinded me
in silence i bear my research only
concerned with the flesh, which goes alone through a desert
i become aware of a return that is only
the descent of jackknives along my cranium
a playing card hovering above the eye of a guilty one
from Dictated by the Pack
Juan Calzadilla
translated from the Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Olivia Lott
Listen to "vivo a diario" read in the original Spanish by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez:
In 1961, Juan Calzadilla co-founded the radical poetry and visual arts collective El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale) in Caracas, Venezuela. The group was energized by the 1959 triumph of the Cuban Revolution and the anti-imperialist revolutionary fervor that swept Latin America in the 1960s. It was a time in which real social transformation felt not only possible, but inevitable.
The early 1960s in Caracas was marked by what has been termed “deformed” or “lopsided” modernity, defined by extreme inequity. The dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez had been overthrown in 1958, but his Nuevo Ideal Nacional (or “New National Ideal”) (1948–1958) mostly remained intact under new president Rómulo Betancourt. The modernizing project was founded on the premise that the country’s oil revenues should fund urban development, which would, in turn, catalyze qualitative social improvement. Modernistic architecture and urban planning radically transformed the city of Caracas, but in reality, this full modernity was experienced only by the urban elite. This mid-century developmentalism more deeply entrenched material and socioeconomic disparities. One Caracas for the rich, another for the poor. State violence and repression worsened.
The balleneros (or whalers) aimed to mobilize the avant-garde to raise consciousness of the realities of the developmentalist agenda. They wrote manifestos (often reworking surrealist techniques), staged Dadaesque public interventions, held polemical art exhibitions, and published poetry and essays under their own editorial label. Rather than rigid social–material dividing lines, the group routinely evoked the metaphor of magma, whose boundless fluidity served as the theoretical axis for an artistic-political project that endeavored to bring about an alternative social order. And rejecting a shiny, anesthetized image of progress, they resolved to investigate trash and capitalist dehumanization, building art from literal and metaphoric byproducts.
Calzadilla participated both as visual artist and writer. He contributed paintings, co-authored manifestos, and published three poetry collections, beginning with Dictado por la jauría [Dictated by the Pack] (1962), from which these poems are selected. The collection illuminates an urban space where the spectacle of Venezuela’s midcentury modernity displays its cracks. The city appears as a “magisterial concrete jungle” that “digests all its victims.” It collapses in on the poetic subject, who finds “no points of exit.” It ossifies his eyelids, pounds jackknives into his cranium. It turns him into a virus, a bug, a cannibal. A poetic subject-turned-abject.
These translations are part of a wider project to make Calzadilla’s 1960s poetry available in English. Their relevance to the inequity and crises we live through today is viscerally felt.
The early 1960s in Caracas was marked by what has been termed “deformed” or “lopsided” modernity, defined by extreme inequity. The dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez had been overthrown in 1958, but his Nuevo Ideal Nacional (or “New National Ideal”) (1948–1958) mostly remained intact under new president Rómulo Betancourt. The modernizing project was founded on the premise that the country’s oil revenues should fund urban development, which would, in turn, catalyze qualitative social improvement. Modernistic architecture and urban planning radically transformed the city of Caracas, but in reality, this full modernity was experienced only by the urban elite. This mid-century developmentalism more deeply entrenched material and socioeconomic disparities. One Caracas for the rich, another for the poor. State violence and repression worsened.
The balleneros (or whalers) aimed to mobilize the avant-garde to raise consciousness of the realities of the developmentalist agenda. They wrote manifestos (often reworking surrealist techniques), staged Dadaesque public interventions, held polemical art exhibitions, and published poetry and essays under their own editorial label. Rather than rigid social–material dividing lines, the group routinely evoked the metaphor of magma, whose boundless fluidity served as the theoretical axis for an artistic-political project that endeavored to bring about an alternative social order. And rejecting a shiny, anesthetized image of progress, they resolved to investigate trash and capitalist dehumanization, building art from literal and metaphoric byproducts.
Calzadilla participated both as visual artist and writer. He contributed paintings, co-authored manifestos, and published three poetry collections, beginning with Dictado por la jauría [Dictated by the Pack] (1962), from which these poems are selected. The collection illuminates an urban space where the spectacle of Venezuela’s midcentury modernity displays its cracks. The city appears as a “magisterial concrete jungle” that “digests all its victims.” It collapses in on the poetic subject, who finds “no points of exit.” It ossifies his eyelids, pounds jackknives into his cranium. It turns him into a virus, a bug, a cannibal. A poetic subject-turned-abject.
These translations are part of a wider project to make Calzadilla’s 1960s poetry available in English. Their relevance to the inequity and crises we live through today is viscerally felt.
Juan Calzadilla (Altagracia de Orituco, Venezuela, 1931) is one of Venezuela’s most celebrated poets, painters, and art critics. He is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and, in 1996, he was awarded Venezuela’s National Prize for the Visual Arts. His work, across both mediums, is characterized by political consciousness and formal innovation; its prominent images include the surrealist chaos of urban space, the violent dehumanization of uneven modernity, and the abject probing of social and aesthetic status quos. In 1961, he co-founded the radical neo-avant-garde collective El Techo de la Ballena (The Roof of the Whale). He published three books with the group, including Dictado por la jauría (Dictated by the Pack; Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, 1962), from which these poems are selected. The translations form part of a larger project to bring out a US edition of all three books in English.
Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator, literary critic, and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her publications include book-length collections by Jorgenrique Adoum, Juan Bañuelos, Juan Calzadilla, Antonio Gamoneda, Juan Gelman, Raúl Gómez Jattin, Fayad Jamís, Hugo Mujica, José Emilio Pacheco, Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, and Ida Vitale, among many other writers. Her work has been named a finalist for both the Best Translated Book Award and the National Translation Award. She is a recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States and a PEN Translates award in the United Kingdom. She is a managing editor for Action Books. She resides in Ohio, where she is professor of Spanish at Kenyon College. Visit her website here.
Olivia Lott is a translator and literary scholar. She is the translator or co-translator of Raúl Gómez Jattin’s Almost Obscene (CSU Poetry Center, 2022), Lucía Estrada’s Katabasis (Eulalia Books, 2020), and Soleida Ríos’s The Dirty Text (Kenning Editions, 2018). Her translations have received recognitions from Academy of American Poets, PPEN America Literary Awards, and Words Without Borders. She holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic studies and is a specialist in the 1960s in Latin America, poetry and poetics, the neo-avant-garde, and translation studies. Her scholarly writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Translation Studies. She is visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University.
