10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 15 :: KATHERINE M. HEDEEN on JORGENRIQUE ADOUM

Week two of this year’s Poetry Month series has been curated by Kate Hedeen, who offers us this final entry on Jorgenrique Adoum; each piece in this week focuses on poetry in translation. Read her curatorial statement here. — EM

Where the fuck is Ecuador?

I am the foreigner in the poem.

It is 1992. Someone takes my picture at “la mitad del mundo.”

I don’t know where Ecuador is.

Jorgenrique Adoum (Ambato,1926–2009) is the most important Ecuadorian intellectual of the twentieth century. I did not know this in 1992 as a college senior studying abroad in Quito; I did not know this in 2003 with my PhD in Hispanic Studies in hand.

It is an unreal country bordered by itself,

split by an imaginary line

and still sunk in the cement at the pyramid foot.

If not, how could the foreigner have a picture taken

openlegged over my homeland as if above a mirror,

the line right below the sex

and on the back: “Greetings from la mitad del mundo.”

(Ecuador Part 1: The Geography)

Adoum was hailed by Chilean Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda as the best poet of his generation in Latin America, but he is still relatively unknown in the Spanish-speaking world. This is in great part because he was from Ecuador, a country often dismissed by literati from the region as an intellectual wasteland. If Adoum is not well-known where he is from, he is completely unknown in the English-speaking world. If Ecuador has had the reputation of being a kind of desert by Latin American intelligentsia, in the U.S. — at best — it’s an eco-tourist paradise — at worst — it simply does not exist.

The soul decayed, that pasillo aches in the rootnerve …

When you still don’t have a homeland but for

this irremediable sadness underneath the pride,

homeland is the memorypocket where I

take this out:

(Ecuador Part 2: The Memory)

Adoum belongs to a groundbreaking group of Spanish American neo-avant-garde poets who begin to publish in the late fifties and that includes writers like Ernesto Cardenal (Nicaragua), Roque Dalton (El Salvador), and Juan Gelman (Argentina), just to name a few. Known as “conversacionalistas,” they are often overlooked for a number of reasons, both in Spanish and in English. On the most basic level, their counterparts in prose are the “Boom” writers; readers may think they know enough about Spanish American writing in the sixties after having read García Márquez or Vargas Llosa. This problem is only exacerbated in English, where access to writing in translation is even more limited and limiting. In any case, poetry doesn’t tend to be a part of the conversation.

But if we do move to the realm of poetry, the neo-avant-garde’s approach often goes unnoticed — or disregarded — because it profoundly challenges conventional poetic aesthetics in Spanish America, where, in general, if you are committed to social change, you are expected to write in an accessible way for a wide audience about topics of social and/or “universal” importance. If you don’t, it’s assumed you have opted for a hermetic, not-easily-understood style because it reflects your reactionary politics. The Spanish-American neo-avant-garde’s poetic project proposes to break down the false dichotomy of committed content versus experimental form. The Cuban Revolution in 1959 had called intellectuals to be committed to social transformation and these poets answered that call, passionately. Yet, they insisted that their poetry be both revolutionary in terms of what they wrote and HOW they wrote it. They believed that poetry must be dialogical, as Víctor Rodríguez Núñez refers to it, requiring an active reader, one who is a co-creator of the work.

The neo-avant-garde’s refusal to make things simple is what attracts me to it as a translator into English. A U.S. readership’s idea of poetry from the region can be narrow, due to a small but very established canon that overemphasizes emotion, sensuality, and political commitment. This, in turn, privileges a direct, immediate tone, one that often engages with the expectation that Latin Americans have a closer (“primitive”) relationship with nature, sexuality, violence, poverty. It leaves little room for the cerebral. The neo-avant-garde — and particularly Adoum’s poetry — challenges these assumptions, which are ultimately informed by a neo-colonialist vision of how Latin Americans “should” write.

aluminum wetsuit clowns clowns

who swap stars like masks

because we couldn’t suppress one single suffering

we know there’s no boldness in the oblivion adventure

besides there’s no oblivion just goodbyes

and there’s no silence from the terrestrial anachronistic heartnoise

and there’s no dialogue in the language tethers we bring

no understanding each other in centuries and kilometers

and even here we are so withnodoubtwhatsoeverly human

that the past sets the same trap

and we keep falling (on venus perhaps due to the rains

each one remembered their hometown like a monday

their scarce poppiless birth river)

and we tried to deangel ourselves to relapse into boring fellow man

into customary hero profession streetcleaner

of the human earth filth

so wonder isn’t a lowblow because of it

(Prologue, Declaration of the Deangeled)

Adoum’s poetry refuses to follow rules: the grammatical rules of an imperial language, for instance. The reader is immediately confronted with all kinds of neologisms based on the invention of compound words, the creation of verbs from nouns, constant wordplay and soundplay. There’s also an emphasis on intertextuality, appropriating language and discourse from the social sciences, from journalism. And an obvious rejection of the rules of Western rationality, too. Much of Adoum’s poetry does not “make sense” in the way that readers might expect. It is not conventionally thematic or topical, things are often not conveniently resolved by the end of a poem.

with hunger and hembra this hombre

his reality surreal

dispictured in his passport

discontent in this discontext

working and worqueen

to be deagonizing from badlyloved

even wanting to disencruel himself

to stand erect to correct and recorrect himself

but this republic public sepulchershop

doesn’t give him enough time

and he keeps redying in a virtuous circle

from his long inhurting disdeath

(Epitaph of the Living Foreigner)

In Adoum’s Prepoemas en postespañol / prepoems in postspanish, I find the possibility to rework English, to break it down, to rebel against its linguistical constraints, and — through language — to attempt to defy the imperialist, neo-colonialist limitations of it: postenglish. This to me is an essential part of being a translator. I have Adoum to thank for leading me one step closer in the articulation of it.

it was out of a dishabit for death out of disdeath

that i’d say monday the coming week next year

talking about the things we are mortalized by

but you were the premortal unpostponeable

you the always urgent lasting instant

in my need for your disdistressing southsoul*

and i didn’t know back then like now that suddenly

there wasn’t going to be more you it might mean no more days

* Note to the linotypist and proofreader: Don’t change the words.

(Gut Feeling)

prepoems in postspanish and other poems collects three of Adoum’s most influential books of poetry (originally published 1973–1993) in a bilingual Spanish-English edition. Its publication is timely because it chronicles a pivotal moment in Latin America and the world more broadly: a crossroads, a re-coming into consciousness, a decolonialist middle finger. Adoum’s poetry is the best of all that: experimental, cerebral, playful, angry, and profoundly transgressive.

after somanyears of maybes perhapses hopefullies

nothing’s left but whys nevermores and eithers

now neverly the mostest

now just the shescorpion

alwaysly not been

pure postlove almost inlove shrouded

in the subsoul or the dislife

decemberly ended

(Beauty Keepsake)

Adoum’s political urgency is a lesson for us. It begins with love. Love Disinterred is his masterpiece in that regard. The long poem reflects upon the “Lovers of Sumpa,” the remains of an embracing Paleo-Indian couple found in Ecuador, as a way to dismantle Western definitions of love and to critique how those definitions limit us. For Adoum, love itself and how we love (romantically and beyond) has the potential to be deeply subversive.

His poems address the realities we are living right now, too, at this tumultuous moment, in a way that can give us perspective and hope.

Where the fuck is Ecuador: “unreal country bordered by itself, / split by an imaginary line.” Adoum’s poetry offers us a map.

I live in an era of pills for sleeping and to lose weight, to relax and die home delivered,

of plastics and furs, of ties and canned food

and of world garbage wandering errant from wave to wave to wave,

era when you could die of a heart attack and never loved

and when no one in literature dies while loving

era of husbands like police, punctual like collectors.

So, when I say love in any language,

it’s like I’m speaking a different tongue

and they don’t know and they search and point me out,

in the city they carry folded up in their pockets for when they need it,

inside a red circle a bank where there is an obscene automatic show,

with credit and teller deferred.

Then I come to the peninsula like to a sandpaper ocean

and here tenderness resuscitates me

(Love, Disinterred)

prepoems in postspanish (tr. Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez) is available from Action Books.

Jorgenrique Adoum was a poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, translator, and playwright. Of Lebanese descent, he was born in the Andean town of Ambato in 1926. As a young man, he studied in Chile, where he became Neruda’s personal secretary. He began publishing poetry in 1949. Upon his return to Ecuador, he worked at a number of cultural institutions, directing the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana’s press, for which he edited and translated his influential anthology of contemporary poetry from around the world, Poesía del siglo XX (1957). He was also a cultural journalist, a contributor to many Latin American journals, and a professor of literature. In 1960, he won the first ever Casa de las Américas prize in Cuba, soon to become the most prestigious literary prize in Latin America. He was named Ecuador’s National Director of Culture in 1961, a position he held until 1963 when he traveled to Egypt, India, Japan, and Israel. Unable to return to Ecuador due to a military coup, he moved to Beijing, then Geneva, and finally settled in Paris, where he lived in exile. While in Paris, he worked for the French publisher Gallimard, was a journalist for French Radio and Television, and translated for the UNESCO, in addition to publishing award-winning poetry, novels, and plays. He returned to his native country in 1987. He continued to write until his death in 2009.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a translator and essayist. A specialist in Latin American poetry, she has translated some of the most respected voices from the region. Her latest publications include prepoems in postspanish & other poems by Jorgenrique Adoum (Action Books, 2021) and from a red barn by Víctor Rodríguez Núñez (co•im•press, 2020). She is a recipient of two NEA Translation grants in the US and a PEN Translates award in the UK. She is a Managing Editor for Action Books and the Poetry in Translation Editor at the Kenyon Review. She resides in Ohio, where she is a Professor of Spanish at Kenyon College.