from United Left

Álvaro Lasso

Artwork by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee

Beijou sua mulher como se fosse a última

El gran hombre decidió ir a la cárcel. No es que estuviera loco, pero necesitaba unas vacaciones. Sus hijos habían crecido lo suficiente como para caminar a través de la niebla. El cabello amarrado de su mujer olía a perfume de países del Este.

Le dijeron que podía retirarse como los grandes. Un complejo carcelario amable, con comodidades, con las soledades para escribir sus últimas páginas. También podían tener putas. Se le ocurrió llevar un taller con ellas: «Trasmitir otro mensaje», se le ocurrió decir, algo más, y rehacer el amor.

Solo una mujer volvió a la segunda charla. Traía una frazada. El gran hombre que besó a su mujer como si fuese la última vez le contó a la señorita la historia de su matrimonio y del perfume lejano. Y en medio del discurso los dueños de la cárcel abrieron las puertas. Todos observaron, como un espectáculo, el golpe de Estado.
 


Poeta joven del Perú, segundo lugar

Supón que escribiste tres libros y que tus ojos tuvieron otros filtros, a pesar de la gran educación de los sillones de tu casa. Supón que ingresaste a Medicina. Supón que cuando viste un miembro muerto tuviste una erección y no la pudiste explicar. Supón que nadie leyó tus libros. Tus tres libros. Entonces escribiste un último libro y los deshojaste como margaritas para que se pierdan en las manos de los trabajadores de poesía. Fuiste el sindicalista de ellos. Tú eras ellos. Supón que nunca lograste el título de Medicina y la pena de no curar te mató. Supón que renunciaste a tu cargo en los rieles de un tren. Supón que te recogieron con espátula. Y que hasta ahora no pueden encontrar todo tu cuerpo, ni tus poemas.



Circuncisión

Eso de jugar a los carritos chocones es un patrón no solo en los hombres sin visa, sino también en los países que acabaron de recuperar su independencia. Los contadores piensan en un documento que los legisle. Entonces, exigen que los poetas redacten el mito. El partido sonríe. El pueblo corre despavorido por las calles estrechas, como los toros en las fiestas. Todos están en la plaza, llenos de sudor y de confianza en sí mismos. En las butacas, miles de fanáticos sienten placer de armar las primeras oposiciones. Nadie ha muerto todavía: los fantasmas no alcanzan la mayoría de edad.

Read the English translation

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.