from Psalm Songs

The translations presented here are from Rosenmann-Taub’s latest collection, Tílimtilín (Psalm Songs), published in December 2021 by LOM Ediciones. This work adds to an already broad corpus of more than forty volumes written over seventy years. That said, I confess that my introduction to him came only recently, and by recommendation, with the release of Tílimtilín. Yet I am glad he came to me as a mystery. If I had known that he was such a prolific writer, already translated into English, Portuguese, and Bengali, then I might have been too intimidated to try. The 2004 winner of the Chilean National Prize for Literature, Armando Uribe, calls Rosenmann-Taub “a major poet, the most outstanding alive.” Bibliophiles familiar with the work of Chilean vanguards such as Rosamel del Valle or Enrique Lihn—who is fictionalized in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s art film Endless Poetry (2016)—will certainly savor Rosenmann-Taub’s originality. And yet, even the most general of readers will applaud the poet’s magic trick of fitting a square peg in a round hole, in that he is able to string esoteric vocabulary through colloquial registers to create deceptively simple verses, endowed with rhythm and soul.

Just a few words more and then a conclusion: the title alludes to psalms and to bells, two topics close to the poet’s heart, given his classical music background and taste for the ethereal in the everyday (in one poem, Christ stops him in a park; in another, a friend “taken by death” observes the poet smiling to himself). All in all, it is a joy to find this same spiritual musicality sung throughout just about every poem, including the five presented here. It made the wait to receive the book—a 7,000-kilometer journey from its printing press in Santiago de Chile to my library in Houston—worth it. Not to mention, it made wanting to translate it an inevitability.