Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation by bruno darío, translated from the Spanish by Kit Schluter, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025
Lantana or, the indissoluble exhalation is bruno darío’s mesmerizing monument to literature. Published as a tripartite collection by the Brooklyn-based Ugly Duckling Presse, it is both a posthumous triumph and an instance of translation as friendship, as a kind of company-keeping in one’s journey across states. When the Mexico City-based darío wrote these beguiling poem sequences during his twenties, he was suffering, then living, then dying of brain cancer, which ultimately killed him at the age of twenty-nine in 2022. The accomplished translator Kit Schluter recounts in his introduction that he was a good friend of darío’s (who insisted on presenting his name in lowercase since the laws of publishing would not allow him to publish wholly anonymously); the two of them, Schluter writes, “had become friends the way poets working in different languages so often do: by translating each other’s work.”
The Lantana trilogy, 153 English pages in all, recounts the doomed, fatal, gorgeous love story between one speaker, “the Inconsolable,” and his beloved, the terrific and terrifying Anfitriona, who kills herself in the first part of the sequence, “feast, fright,” then stays silent in the second, “airsickness,” as the Inconsolable writes letters about her, his life, and his work. Finally, in the third section, “raze,” she is able to speak a bit before the voice of Gravity—the gravity that pulls her deeper into the earth, into her final destination as earth—takes the final word.
There are several paths into darío’s work; I’ll start with Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass is referred to frequently throughout the book, the magnum opus of the poet of the body facing the cryptic missives of a young poet approaching death. “I sing the body electric,” darío quotes in English in one of his poems, and he does—he sings the body electric, but he sings the body as it disappears from the realm of bodies past, the body as it crumbles or effloresces into the realm of the intellect and the image. These, more than the flesh, are the guarantors of eternity, and darío takes us on a tour of the seam between them and the real.
“Language is the last resort, that unbreachable rampart behind which humanity feels safe,” he writes immediately following the Whitman quote. “I make this wall mine in order to see it, and I’m not wasting my time looking at the wall. Things are passing through me.” And such “things” are many over these pages: marches, lullabies, “the troops of thoughts,” “Dad,” the century, the “Mystic Mansion” where the Inconsolable meets Anfitriona, whose name could be translated into English as “the Hostess.” These bricks in the wall of reality are things we’d like to grab onto so as to know where we are and that we are safe and clothed—that we are while reading, mentally speaking, investitured with the things of the world. But just beyond them lie the abyss, the vacancy: in Spanish, el vacío.
“To encompass is to stroke the void [el vacío], that subtle material. / … / Perception is an ally, and it lends structure; / let’s try to unwrap experience and bring it sensitively out of focus, / rendering it unclassifiable,” darío writes in “The Living Place.”
What structures our perception is both the stuff of poetry and the obstacles that stand in the way of a truer, deeper way of seeing the world. Darío seems to have taken this notion up as a call to arms; you can see him crafting a poetic idiom that would demand maximum top-to-bottom involvement on the reader’s part—persuasive, seductive, and concussive enough to enforce a different way of viewing.
Here, the heroism of Schluter’s translation is clear. Darío has a rollicking style, where out-there images, surprising turns of phrase, wordplay, and soundplay all conspire to render experience unclassifiable and bring it out of focus. He can careen from voice to voice, from mode to mode, and Schluter fluently preserves a consistency of tone and a warm cohesion in the English, whether the speaker is playing with a romantic groundswell (“and the earth roaming its sleepwalking orbit, / will collide with the gravity of my heart”), a surrealish twist (“Dad I’m gonna be on TV / arrested for covering my breath with ink / the weight of the ponderous pupils leafing through my afternoons”), or a pitch-perfect aphorism (“The love I practice pales beside the love I write”).
Certain instances in the translation evoke the vision of Schluter and darío wiling away their afternoons in the latter’s Roma Norte garret, having their poet’s fun. In “Time out,” a little girl walking “a ti(e)ntas”—tinta is ink; a tientas is “blindly”—becomes a little girl “Gropink, stepping as slowly as smoke. . .” In one of the November poems, the original line “Me saco los huesos para ser fogata con ellos” becomes “I pick apart my skeleton to make a bon(e)fire.” The whoops and high-fives when they landed on these ones almost rise up from the page.
The glee and daring of darío’s style, his technicolor whiz-kid pyrotechnics, induce an especially poignant and headlong involvement on the reader’s part. You want to curl up against these words and press your face to their warmth; language rarely feels as palpably present as it does in Lantana. Yet, at the same time—and here’s the gut-wrenching genius of the book—it’s clear that all those words, for all their beauty and vividness, their life-givingness, are also meager protests against the enormity of the void and its silence. Darío ponders, in one of the Inconsolable’s letters, the concept from the Tao Te Ching which states that the empty space of a structure is what defines its function; the hollowness of the clay vessel being what makes it useful, the vacancy of the window creating its value. And so the poem: “Not even language escapes; we erect sentences that rise up, (s/d)welling with meaning [“enorgullecidas de sentido” in the original]. Alongside and in relation to others, the letters of the alphabet go on their comfortable strolls.”
So what is the emptiness that language wraps around and draws its purpose from? Surely death is one contender, death in general and the specific death the poet was facing while writing these lines. Impending death is famously a strong impetus for poetry, from Keats to Lorca (whom darío refers to by name, and whose swooping boldness leaves an indelible mark on this work). Every line written down, printed, published, and preserved is a small leap of the soul encoded and made a thing in the world; I imagine most writers hope to exist after death more as corpus than as corpse.
But parallel to that big daddy of dyads, life and death and death and life, is the quieter everyday relation of form to nothingness that darío explores. “Mute are the things that populate existence . . . and we keep finding them with our bodies,” he writes in “Pendulums, Loose Attractions.” Giving names is a way to slot something into language—a system of meaning that, like mathematics, appears to be in touch with the deepest laws and relations of nature while also seeming to have been invented by humans. But the things of the world are ultimately indifferent to those efforts; they continue being what they are, quietly, serenely, bodily. Language, too, is a thing in the world, and it too must be found with the body, through the body—through poetry, that is: “Language can’t be translated into mere words.”
The glory of language and its great failure, as staged in Lantana, is that its rehearsal of interconnectedness is but a paltry imitation of the true web of connection that everything beyond us enjoys. Language is a consolation for the conscious living that has to exist, for a brief moment, outside the order of life.
“Oh, but only by dying can one achieve nudity,” darío writes. “When the spirit leaves the body and disperses into the atmosphere and once again becomes a part of every phenomenon. To be unclothed is a state of the soul.”
By the end of the trilogy, as Anfitriona stages her last revolt against eternity before Gravity takes her fully in, she sends out a swan song where the extravagant futility and the grave nobility of this book, of the life of letters and the poetic enterprise it represents, are raised to the highest, most piercing pitch:
Do you claim to place your trust in tomorrow,
on which your duties and loves depend?
I too played hide-and-seek with the present,
finding each other in the smile of everything that surrounded us
—in dreams, yes, in the infinite dream of finite things.
Then it got tired of looking.How does something come undone?
You can’t avoid me.
Look for me in time. Give them my message:If I am dead, I still am.
Reducing myself to the irreducible.
I end myself in order to fit, at last, in every moment.Anfitriona of the air.
Anfitriona returns to silence. But that silence is changed, because she has spoken.
Daniel Yadin is a writer, reporter, and bartender in New York City. He is an associate poetry editor at Asymptote.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: