from United Left

Álvaro Lasso

Artwork by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

Beijou sua Mulher como se Fosse a Última

The great man decided to go to prison. It’s not that he was crazy, but he needed a vacation. His children had grown up enough to walk through the mist. His wife’s tied-back hair smelled of perfume from the countries in the East.

They told him he could retire, just like the greats. A nice prison complex, with all the comforts, with enough solitude to write his final pages. They were also allowed whores. It occurred to him to lead a workshop for them: “Convey other messages,” he burst out, “push yourselves, restore love.”

Only one woman came back for the second talk. She brought a blanket. The great man who had kissed his wife as if for the last time told the young woman the story of his marriage, and about the foreign perfume. And in the middle of their discussion the prison managers opened the doors. They all watched, like a performance, the takeover of the State.


 
Young Poet from Peru, Second Place

Suppose you wrote three books and that your eyes had different filters, in spite of the great education you’d received from the armchairs at home. Suppose you were admitted to Medicine. Suppose that when you saw a dead member you got an erection you couldn’t explain. Suppose no one read your books. Your three books. So you wrote one final book and tore out all the pages like daisy petals so they’d get lost in the hands of the poetry workers. You were their trade unionist. You were them. Suppose you never earned a degree in Medicine and the pain of not being able to heal wrecked you. Suppose you handed over your burden on the train tracks. Suppose they scraped you up with a spatula. And even now they can’t find all the parts of your body, or all your poems.



Circumcision

That thing about playing bumper cars not only applies to men without visas, but also to countries that have just regained their independence. The accountants draw up a document to legislate them, then demand the poets draft the myth. The party smiles. People run horror-struck through the wide streets, like bulls during the festivals. Everyone’s in the plaza, covered in sweat and self-confidence. In their theater seats, thousands of fanatics have the pleasure of mounting the first opposition. No one has died yet: ghosts don’t reach manhood.

translated from the Spanish by Kelsi Vanada

Read the original in Spanish

The short prose pieces in Izquierda Unida (United Left) build a surreal world in which the corruption of innocence, the abuse of power, the frailty of identity, and the threat of capitalism are everywhere evident in cinematic relief. The narrator is constantly “in the face of” something, to use a line from the book: the political force of an unspecified “party,” money-hungry capitalist “drug companies,” and accountants who get to draft laws.

As writer Álvaro Lasso explains in an interview with fellow Peruvian writer Gabriela Wiener, Izquierda Unida is “ultimately the story of a country—ours—and its violent transformations, the story of the war that forced its way into our teenage years or our childhoods, and how that war has configured the collective imaginations of the adults we are now. It’s the story of those of us who write that history, but were neither the winners nor the losers.”

Getting the visual aspect of each word right in these microtexts was essential in translating them into English, with few words to sketch the scene—in “Circumcision,” is the crowd sitting in armchairs? stadium seats? stands? theater seating? easy chairs? Does the plaza look more like an arena? a sports stadium? a theater? a living room? These are all questions that arose just concerning the visual aspect of the word butacas. On a syntactical level, though many sentences are seemingly short and uncomplicated, they are in fact balanced on the precise connections between clauses, certain characters becoming implicated just by their inclusion in pronoun referents.

Lasso is also a publisher, and many of the pieces in the book have to do with the viability of literature and the political nature of publishing. His stance? “The independent publisher is the guerilla fighter of the twenty-first century.” Though it is darkly sarcastic, if there’s a note of hope in his book, it’s in this belief in literature’s independence, and in the power—though it also has the power to fail—of the collective.

Álvaro Lasso was born in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan, in 1982. At ten months old, he was relocated to Peru. He studied Hispanic Literature at Peru’s Pontificia Universidad Católica and founded the poetry festival Novissima verba (2001-2006), the poetry magazine Odumodneurtse! (2003-2006), and the Libromóvil project (2011-2015), a series of street booksellers in Peru. He is both founder and editor of Estruendomudo, one of the most important independent publishing companies in Latin America since 2004. His work has brought him to book fairs in Guadalajara, Santiago, Quito, Madrid, and Frankfurt, as well as to editorial forums in Paris, San Juan, and Buenos Aires. Lasso has published three books: Dos niñas de Egon Schiele (Two of Egon Schiele’s Girls, 2006), The Astrud Gilberto Album (2010), and Izquierda Unida (United Left, Celacanto, 2015 and La Bella Varsovia, 2016). He lives in Santiago, Chile, where he has opened an office of Estruendomudo.

Kelsi Vanada published her translation of The Eligible Age by Berta García Faet in 2018 with Song Bridge Press. She holds M.F.A.'s in poetry (Iowa Writers' Workshop, 2016) and literary translation (University of Iowa, 2017). She writes poems and translates from Spanish and collaboratively from Swedish, and her work has been published most recently in The Iowa Review, the Bennington Review, the Literary Review, Gulf Coast, and Anomaly. Her chapbook of poems Rare Earth is forthcoming (Finishing Line Press, 2020), as is her translation of Sergio Espinosa’s Into Muteness (Veliz Books, 2020). Kelsi was a 2016 ALTA Travel Fellow and the winner of a 2018 Scandinavian-American Foundation translation prize, and she is the Program Manager of the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in Tucson, Arizona. Together with Marie Silkeberg, she won Asymptote’s “Close Approximations” contest in 2016.