de Las Cosas Nuevas

Ennio Moltedo

6
 

                                                                                                  a Gonzalo Contreras

Los años acumulan el recuerdo de los muertos. Dar la espalda: un gesto para el desprecio.
Avanzar la memoria: escape de las culpas. ¿Por qué siempre tocan el timbre cuando es de noche?
Sólo se trata de un gesto involuntario que continúa suspendido y que resiste desaparecer.
Restos de material orgánico, luminosidad de poca monta que se arrastra a pesar de los años y de la lluvia que todo lo barre en este país de convento. Se mantiene viva la pregunta y es tan pública la vitrina que se ha vuelto costumbre en generaciones. La tierra, por su parte, abriéndose en calidad de testigo muestra las hebras y flores del crimen.
Nunca habrá un día adecuado para nosotros.
 
 
                                                                     
17
 
A lo largo de cinco mil kilómetros, frente al Pacífico, sin motivo cierto se encuentran formados y firmes—manitas abajo—los moais el sistema binominal.
Sistema votación de chilenos lejanos frente a mares de lágrimas.
Sistema votación de chilenos para desarmar porcentaje armado de cobre.
Sistema votación para que culpables dejen de juzgar a inocentes.
Sistema votación de la amnistía fuera del tiempo del sol y lluvia.
Sistema votación por desacato, derogada por emperatriz Teodora y vigente aquí.
Sistema votación para que la ley del océano rija sólo sobre el océano.
Sistema votación para suscribir algún día el Estatuto de Roma que castiga el asesinato (a toda hora).
 
 
Lector, a continuación puedes anotar tu enmienda constitucional con tinta invisible.
 
 
                                                             
42
 
La caravana a través del desierto y lagos del sur fue planeada con sentido moderno:
Helicópteros entre luces y sombras—albanoche—para cumplir deseo de Macbeth:
“Madruga y mata primero.”

Read the English translation

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.