from New Things

Ennio Moltedo

6

                                                                                              to Gonzalo Contreras 

 
The years agglomerate memories of the dead. Turning one’s back: a gesture of contempt.
Promoting memory: an escape from guilt. Why do they always ring the bell at night? For no more than a gesture—involuntary, suspended, resistant to erasure.
Remains of organic material, pale fluorescence that drags itself through the years despite the rain that erases everything in this convent of a country.
The question remains alive, its showcase so public that it’s now a custom handed down through the generations.
The earth, offering itself as a witness, displays the vines and flowers of the crime.
There will never come a day we are worthy of.
 

 
17
 
Along five thousand kilometers of coastline facing the Pacific, of mysterious creation, molded and massive—little hands pointing down—are the Moais of our bicameral system.
Voting system for far-away Chilenos facing oceans of tears.
Voting system for Chilenos to disarm the armed percentage of copper.
Voting system for Chilenos to make the guilty stop convicting the innocent.
Voting system for amnesty beyond the time of sunshine and rain.
Voting system for contempt, annulled by the Empress Theodora, but valid here.
Voting system for an oceanic law that only rules the ocean.
Voting system that will eventually incorporate the Rome Statute to punish murder (no statute of limitation).
 
Reader, here below you can write your own constitutional amendment with invisible ink.
 
 
 
42
  
The caravan through the desert and the southern lakes was planned in the modern way:
helicopters between lights and shadows—nightdawn death—Rise early, kill first, channeling Macbeth.

translated from the Spanish by Marguerite Feitlowitz

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to an excerpt of the original Spanish read by the translator:

Ennio Moltedo’s final two books—Night (World Poetry Books, 2022), which I also translated, and New Things—can be seen as two sides of a revolving disk. Moltedo wrote Night (La noche; Ediciones Altazor, 1999) largely in secret, during and against the Pinochet dictatorship. New Things confronts the ways in which civilian society maintained central hallmarks of the old regime: neo-liberal economy; privatized development; class-based discrimination. There have also been intense polemics about memory, accountability, and justice, and these too figure in Moltedo’s poems.

Each of the three poems published here throws into high relief signature elements of Moltedo’s style. In “6,” a poem of enforced oblivion (or the performance of oblivion) we’re given a series of blunt declarative statements that brook no rebuttal. A question (“Why do they always ring the bell at night?) suddenly erupts in the middle of a line: a question that enfolds an undeniable fact and a still-internalized fear (the nocturnal raid by Pinochet’s commandos). We have the very earth as witness (without specific mention of desaparecidos thrown from airplanes into the desert or the sea), “displaying the vines and flowers of the crime.” The poem ends with a collective statement of searing guilt and self-loathing, in which the speaker includes himself.

In “17,” Moltedo employs the unknown origins of the Moais to suggest that the whys and wherefores of Chile’s legal codes are likewise shrouded in mystery. Then he hammers away with seven consecutive repetitions of “Voting System for . . . ” enacting and protecting a catalog of crimes. End of mystery. The closing line (“Reader, here below you can write your own constitutional amendment with invisible ink.”) is prescient. During my last research trip to Chile (September 2023), the country was preparing to vote on a new Constitution, offering a host of new rights for women, children, and indigenous peoples, protections for the environment, health care, education, and social services. By a large margin, it was voted down in favor of keeping the Constitution promulgated under Pinochet.

The extremely compressed “42” gives us an image that seems archaic and surreal, but which is taken from fact (Pinochet’s “Caravans of Death”). For Moltedo, the reality required the invention of a new word—nightdawn [albanoche]—and recourse to Macbeth.

So what here is really new? Reader, Moltedo throws the question to you.

Ennio Moltedo (1931–2012) was a native of the seaport city of Valparaíso. The son of Italian immigrants to Chile, he is a poet of the sea, and his connection to ancient Mediterranean poets can be seen, heard, and felt in his poems. He published eight collections of poems, collaborated with visual artists, and was director of the Universidad de Valparaíso Press. Night, his first collection in English, was translated by Marguerite Feitlowitz and published by World Poetry Books in 2022. Written during and against the Pinochet dictatorship, it was not published in Chile until the end of that regime. Raúl Zurita called Moltedo “one of the finest, greatest, most curious and honorable poets of Chile.”

Marguerite Feitlowitz has recently translated Ennio Moltedo’s Night (World Poetry Books, 2022), which was written during and against the Pinochet dictatorship (supported by an NEA Fellowship), and the French Holocaust writer Liliane Atlan’s Small Bibles for Bad Times: Selected Prose and Poetry (Mangdel Vilar Press, 2021). She has also translated Griselda Gambaro, Salvador Novo, Angélica Gorodischer, and Luisa Valenzuela. She’s the author of the internationally acclaimed A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture (Oxford University Press, 1998).
 
Her fiction, essays, translation, and writings on visual art and theater have appeared in ACM, Asymptote, BOMB, Catapult, DELOS, Dissent, The Nation, Les Temps Modernes, el viejo topo, among other journals and anthologies. Among her awards and fellowships are two Fulbrights to Argentina, a nonfiction fellowship to the Bunting Institute (now called the Radcliffe Institute), and a Harvard Faculty Research Grant.