Posts filed under 'coup'

Anti-Revolutions: How Nicanor Parra Predicted His Country’s 2019 Uprising, Part II

[M]aybe Parra is himself Hamlet, paralyzed with doubt about the truth of things and his own role in doing something about it.

Tim Benjamin continues his exposition of the collaboration between revolution and poetics in the  work of Chile’s notorious antipoet, Nicanor Parra. In Liz Werner’s witty translation of his verse in the brazenly titled Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great, cynicism, humor, silences, and brutal critique manifest in turns; the deep truths are gathered and reckoned with in the spaces where they collide. Read the first part of this essay here.

Revolts have their actual front lines, of course, and in the case of Chile, these were the columns of students, artists, and veterans of the “Penguin” movements of the early 2000s advancing toward increasingly hostile, increasingly anxious walls of police and military forces employing tear gas and rubber bullets. Recently back in Santiago, after the plebiscite had already been decided, a Colombian friend of mine gave me a tour of the uprising’s hot spots, where he went each evening in solidarity with his adopted country’s awakening. He described scenes of shifting pockets of absolute chaos which had popped up here and there, before dispersing with the wafting, seemingly intentional clouds of tear gas and booms of deterrent rounds. Walking down Alameda Ave, he pointed out to me all the landmarks that were forced to close during the uprising. That afternoon, he and I attended one of the Friday protests, which have continued to this day; as we walked down an Alameda Ave closed off to traffic, I noticed the small crush of people lining the street, not doing much except being there—in conversation with friends, smoking, or staring south to where, before a small plaza, a scuffle began. It wasn’t long before the gas came in one expansive burst, and the people in front of the plaza began to disperse. We thought we were far enough away, but a breeze brought us the invisibly searing burn—and a series of Good Samaritans hopping to with spray bottles of sodium bicarbonate and lemon juice, offering temporary relief. “You get used to it,” my friend said, as we turned back toward Lastarria and its street vendors and mid-scale restaurants. “You build up a tolerance.” And for some reason, through the sandpaper-burn in our cheeks and eyelids, we laughed at this. I don’t know why. I couldn’t imagine getting “used to it.”

Somehow, though, the pain felt justified—the concrete consequence giving body to a concept which I was only partly cognizant of. But it wasn’t the kind of pain that gives legitimacy to criticisms of the government, whose force (normally) seeks justification even after the fact. In other words, it wasn’t a political pain, which is reserved, fair or not, for the majority who hang back from the clashes, repeating the language of revolt that the front line incarnates. After the country’s President, Sebastian Piñera, declared the country “at war” with itself, other friends I spoke with said they would work during the day and go directly to Santiago’s main square after getting off every night, and it was these rear-guard protests that increasingly took on an air of intense jubilation—veritable revolutionary parties in streets fogged in tear gas and the volleying booms of urban warfare, as if the certainty of the success of the cause was enough to start the celebrations a priori. The reaction of those in charge were typically evasive, or offensive. One government minister casually suggested that instead of revolting in the streets, people should wake up early to avoid the increase in public transportation fares; others suggested “alien agents” descending on the country to induce chaos, which social media and protest signage quickly meme-ified.

While lack of shame and self-awareness is the realized utopia of the modern politician, it seems the uprising’s jubilance shared in Parra’s strangely unpretentious counter-narrative to it. More than a few of his poems might work as semi-mystical memes; take the poem “No president’s statue escapes,” whose three verses follow from the title to form a simple, declarative meditation on history’s losing struggle with time: From those infallible pigeons / Clara Sandoval tells us. / Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing. Both the pigeons and the topless protesters straddling these same statues are definitive symbols of the “certainty” mentioned above, both moving into that rare space where parody becomes something more eternal than mockery.

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Rebel Poetry: Rodrigo Lira’s Testimony of Circumstances in Review

Lira’s neologisms, wordplay, intertextuality, and assonance-based rhythms would cost even the best translator a pint of blood.

Testimony of Circumstances by Rodrigo Lira, translated from the Spanish by Thomas Rothe and Rodrigo Olavarría, Cardboard House Press

Latin America gave the second half of the twentieth century some of its most destructive and incendiary poetry. In Bogotá, in the 1960s, the Nadaistas threw copies of Cervantes into a bonfire and shouted from rooftops of an imminent socio-poetic revolution, and anyone who knows the name Bolaño has likely heard how Mexico’s Infrarealistas heckled the hell out of Octavio Paz. This was the period of poesía rebelde, rebel poetry, in which agitation played a big role on the street and the page. One particularly volatile poet from this milieu was Rodrigo Lira, who stuck out even at a time when this sort of counter-cultural militancy wasn’t unheard of. Testimony of Circumstances, translated into English by Rodrigo Olavarría and Thomas Rothe, secures his position as a true outsider in a world full of pretenders.

Born in 1949 into an upper middle-class family, Rodrigo Lira received a good education and spent his first fifteen years in close proximity to Chile’s elite, but as a teenager he began to veer far from bourgeois respectability. He ingested substantial amounts of weed. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and had electroshock therapy at his family’s insistence. He rallied behind Salvador Allende’s socialist government until Augusto Pinochet’s U.S.-backed coup turned Chile into a nationalist, ultra-capitalist nightmare. Anyone with left-wing sympathies risked persecution, and the new regime kidnapped and executed thousands of its own citizens on that very charge. Although Lira grew quiet on political matters, he was hardly mute.

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Translating the Ottoman Quartet: An Interview with Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi

In practical terms, communication with the author is difficult: we can only communicate through his lawyers.

Ahmet Altan’s writing is sprawling, ambitious, radical—so radical that the author is currently serving a life sentence on charges of inciting the plotters behind Turkey’s 2016 failed coup. In the latest instalment of the Asymptote Book Club interview series, Altan’s co-translators, Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi, reveal that their only contact with the author is through his lawyers. No written materials can be carried into or out of the prison where Altan is serving his sentence, but work continues on the final volume of the monumental Ottoman Quartet.

In conversation with Asymptote’s Garrett Phelps, Freely and Türedi give us an insight into how they came to translate Altan’s work, and why a novel sequence of novels dealing with the events of the early twentieth century has never felt fresher or more contemporary.

Garrett Phelps (GP): Like a Sword Wound is set during a momentous period in Turkish history and details the cycle of chaos which ultimately results in the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. As translators, did you feel the setting added to your burden of responsibilities?

Brendan Freely and Yelda Türedi (BF/YT): Both of us are quite familiar with this period, so the setting as such did not present any particular problem. However, we were aware of the echoes of the current political situation in Turkey, and of how little the main political currents seem to have changed in over a hundred years. In practical terms, although Like a Sword Wound was written in modern Turkish rather than Ottoman Turkish, Ahmet Altan made an effort to reflect the language of the period, often choosing outdated words and phrases. In our initial meeting to discuss the translation, he was concerned about how we would approach this. We agreed to take the same approach he did—that is, to prefer older words and phrasing to evoke the mindset of the period while still keeping the language current enough to avoid alienating contemporary readers.

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Milton Hatoum’s The Brothers and the Politics of Forgetting

Oppression builds insidiously, explodes in all its terror, and then slips quietly back under the surface.

I stand in my basement facing stacks of cardboard boxes, the remnants of my last cross-country move out to Boulder, CO. If you were to take a cross-section of each box, you would see the sediments of everyday objects: a top layer of clothes; the occasional sweater enveloping a ceramic mug; a layer of miscellaneous household necessities (clothes hangers, desk supplies, etc.); and finally, a thick deposit of books.

At the bottom of one of these boxes I found a thin book, barely visible between the thick spines of a heavily annotated copy of Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives and a fat collection of Pushkin short stories. I pulled out the paperback, which turned out to be a Brazilian novel, The Brothers, written by Milton Hatoum and translated into English by John Gledson. I couldn’t be sure if I had actually read the book before rediscovering it in the crevice of a cardboard box.

I flipped to the copyright information. The original was published in 2000, with the English translation released two years later. Milton Hatoum is a Brazilian author of Lebanese descent, born in 1952 in Manaus, a city in the Amazon. I flipped to the blurb, which promised the story of a Lebanese immigrant family, focusing on the rivalry between two twins, Yaqub and Omar, who live in Manaus in the latter half of the 20th century.

It’s an intriguing premise, one that draws on the age-old trope of brotherly rivalry, harkening back to Cain and Abel, to The Brothers Karamazov, and to Machado de Assis’s Esaú e Jacó. The novel promised to capture the author’s own experience as a man of Middle Eastern descent from a peripheral region of Brazil. I couldn’t remember how it went from my bookshelf to being snugly packed, which made me curious to investigate further. I left my final box unopened, sat down on the pillows and blankets I had piled on the floor, and began reading. The novel opens with an epigraph, a quote from a Carlos Drummond de Andrade poem:

 

   “The house was sold with all its memories

            all its furniture all its nightmares

            all the sins committed, or just about to be;

            the house was sold with the sound of its doors banging

            with its windy corridors its view of the world

                        its imponderables.”

 

The narrative then begins with Yaqub’s homecoming to Manaus from Lebanon, where he had spent some years of his youth, and the reuniting of the two twins under a single roof. Hatoum unveils ever-mounting tensions amongst members of the family through their domestic alliances and conflicts, and the touching and torrid backstories that define those relationships; rich descriptions of setting provide a fascinating portrait of Manaus, albeit one that is devoid of exoticization; and the complex exploration of character in simple, quotidian situations calls upon the wide-ranging tradition of the family saga in literature.

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