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Review by Craig Santos Perez
I first read Jaime Luis Huenún’s work in ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets (Poetry in Indigenous Languages Series of the Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998), edited by Cecilia Vicuña and translated by John Bierhorst. In the preface, Vicuña describes “ül” (song, poetry) as “not an anthropological category but a definition for poetry, a way of being—through speech.” She suggests that “the ultimate meaning of the cultural renaissance now being brought about by Native American political and artistic movements is that it completes—transforms—the image we have of ourselves and of our land”. Huenún’s poetry, both in ÜL: Four Mapuche Poets and in Puerto Trakl / Port Trakl, completes and transforms representations of self, place, and poetry.
In the Translator’s Introduction to Port Trakl, Daniel Borzutzky considers the implications of Huenún’s work: “From an outsider’s perspective, the thought of a Mapuche poet from Southern Chile writing in the shadow of the great and tragic Austrian writer Georg Trakl, who killed himself at the age of 27, seems, if not odd, then at least notable for its inter-cultural mélange and its implications about globalization and poetry. But perhaps the question of why a poet from the ‘deep south’ would turn to central Europe for inspiration is in itself problematic, assuming as it does a false provincialism”. Borzutzky rightly problematizes what would otherwise be a provincial “outsider perspective” that assumes Huenún’s ‘deep southern’ roots would elicit a sense of surprised oddity at his global learning (Indigenous poets have been navigating globalization and its consequences for centuries).
Vicuña does describe Huenún as “the most literary of the [four Mapuche poets],” locating his immersion in Latin American poetry, especially the work of César Vallejo and José María Arguedas. Interestingly, it seems to me that Huenún’s work in Ül is far more influenced by Trakl’s expressionism and symbolism than Puerto Trakl, which isn’t to say that Trakl doesn’t also leave his tracks on Port Trakl. To ground Trakl’s influence on this particular work, Trakl’s poem “Three Dreams” (from his 1909 collection) is a good place to start:
Three Dreams
I
I think, I dreamed of falling leaves,
Of wide forests and dark lakes,
Of sad words' echo—
However, I could not understand their meaning.
I think, I dreamed of falling stars,
Of the weeping entreaty of pale eyes,
Of a smile's echo—
However, I could not understand its meaning.
Like falling leaves, like falling stars,
So I saw myself eternally coming and going,
A dream's immortal echo—
However, I could not understand its meaning.
II
In my soul's dark mirror
Are pictures of never-seen seas,
Of abandoned, tragic imaginary lands,
Dissolving into the blue, the thereabouts.
My soul bore blood-purple skies
Shone through by gigantic, crackling suns,
And strangely animated, shimmering gardens,
That steamed with muggy, deadly delights.
And my soul's dark fountain
Created pictures of immense nights,
Moved by nameless cantos
And breaths of eternal powers.
My soul shudders memory-dark,
As if it found itself in everything—
In unfathomable seas and nights,
And deep cantos, without beginning and end.
III
I saw many towns as if robbed by flame
And the times accumulated atrocity after atrocity,
And saw a lot of people putrefy to dust,
And everything float into oblivion.
I saw the gods fall to the night,
The holiest harps powerlessly smashed,
And kindled anew from putrefaction,
A new life swelling to the day.
Swelling to the day and again passing,
The eternally identical tragedy,
That thus we play without understanding,
And its insanity's nightly torture
Wreathes the soft glory of beauty
Like a smiling universe of thorns.
(trans. by Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt)
Images of “never seen seas” and “abandoned, tragic imaginary lands” exist in the “soul’s dark mirror” and provide the mirrored-dream of the speaker’s journey to, within, and from Port Trakl. Huenún’s dream-like collection (presented bilingually verso/recto) is composed mainly of a single stanza on each page, with their location on the page shifting throughout the book. The first page marks the beginning of the journey:
Bajé a Puerto Trakl entre neblinas.
Buscaba el bar de la Buena suerte para charlar sobre la travesía.
Pero todos miraban la estrella polar en sus copas,
mudos como el mar frente a una isla desierta.
Salí a vagar por las calles con faroles rojos.
Las mujeres se ofrecían sin afecto, fragrantes y cansadas.
“A Puerto Trakl los poetas vienan a morir”, me dijeron
sonriendo en todos los idomas del mundo.
Yo les dejé poemas que pensaba llevar a mi tumba
como prueba de mi paso por la tierra.
I got off in the fog of Port Trakl,
searching for the bar of good fortune to chat about my trip.
But everyone stared at the polar stars in their drinks,
silent like the sea off a desert island.
I went out to roam the red-lit streets.
Perfumed and bored women, selling their tired bodies.
“In Port Trakl poets come to die,” they said,
smiling in all the languages of the world.
I gave them poems I planned to take to my grave
as proof of my time on Earth.
An interesting dynamic takes shape from the outset: while the speaker traverses Port Trakl describing his impressions, experiences, and thoughts, the reader enters the fog of the book itself, Port Trakl. Everyone in the port, including the reader, is an “exile” and we are compelled to “[l]isten, just listen, to the crash of the waves, / as the blackbird cries / between branches and wind”. There are small, atmospheric moments like this throughout the book; another example, on a page all its own, reads: “I saw flowers die in the sea / burnt from salt on the horizon. / A woman threw roses from the port / into the furious waves”. Huenún manages to maintain an imagistic intensity while imbuing this intensity with symbolic meaning, much like Trakl.
This landscape establishes the backdrop for much of what occurs in Port Trakl:
Bebimos el vodka de madame “Su”
en el hotel Melancholía.
Nos habió de sus novios,
su vejez,
y de uno gatos perdidos en el puerto.
La noche llegó desde un poema de Trakl
que ella guardaba en la memoria.
Alzamos nuestras copas y, sin prisa,
cada cual volvió a su propria
y cotidiana decadencia.
We drank Madame “Su’s” vodka
in the Hotel Melancholia.
She spoke of her boyfriends,
her old age,
of some cats lost in the port.
Night fell through a poem by Trakl
stored in her memory.
We lifted our glasses and, slowly,
we each returned
to our own quotidian decadency.
“Quotidian decadency” aptly describes the expressionist aspect of Huenún’s work. However, it doesn’t account for the other major maneuver in this book, what we might call the “turbulent poverty” of narrative:
Creí que pronto arribaría el barco
de la salvación.
En tanto esperaba me hundí en las cantinas
y en trabajos de Puerto.
Pasaron los años, los pleitos, las mujeres
y ni sombra ni noticias del imaginado navío.
Aprendí a tolerar el paso de otros buques
contemplando en el muelle las maniobras de zarpe.
La vejez—mi horizonte—sepultó esa esperanza
perdida como un naúfrago en la turbia
mezquindad de los mares.
I thought the ship would arrive soon
from salvation.
To pass the time I submerged myself in cantinas
and in the work of ports.
Years passed, arguments, women
with no shadow nor news of the imaginary ship.
By studying from the pier their maneuverings of departure
I learned to tolerate the passing of other vessels.
Old age—my horizon—hid my hope
lost like a castaway in the ocean’s
turbulent poverty.
The turbulence of narrative is embodied in the shifting locations of the stanzas on each page, as if the page itself has its own currents and is washing these poems into port. The narrative movements from page to page often don’t accumulate but traverse time and space, creating feelings of disorientation and alienation. These feelings come most fully ashore in the sparsest page of Port Trakl: “The port’s border is in your eyes: / the horizon and the sun / in an empty bottle”. The “work of ports” becomes a kind of borderland where many languages and peoples come together to find themselves stranded in the ruins.
In the introduction, Borzutzky parallels Port Trakl with Chile: “In a Chilean context, the isolation and abandonment of Port Trakl and its residents certainly evoke the isolation and abandonment of the indigenous communities in the south.” Although there aren’t any direct references made to Chile, Borzutzy’s reading of the symbolism in Port Trakl seems ghostly legible, especially when Huenún writes: “This is how servants return to the Deep South, / with a native son stuck to the nipple of / a port he cannot leave”. Borzutzy describes how Huenún has spoken of Port Trakl as “a representative metaphor for the way in which countries like Chile sell their souls to enter the first world, which results in, among other things, an even further abandonment of indigenous peoples”. Through this lens, we can read Port Trakl as Huenún’s depiction of the movement into “first world” ruins, with the poet and the characters he encounters trapped in a post-apocalyptic world (that is, a neo-colonial world) where “no hand waves goodbye to your eyes, / no skin awaits your return”.
Alongside this socio-political reading, Port Trakl is about poetry itself. There are small moments throughout that evoke poetry’s role in the speaker’s life: “the words of a useless poetry will give the river / the prints my feet leave / on the water’s reflection”; “Meanwhile, the silence will do what it can / to those poems sweetly burning / in the overflowing ashtrays of your life”; “I gave them poems I planned to take to my grave / as proof of my time on Earth”; “Like a singer at markets and cantinas / forever repeating the same songs, / I recite my poems to the ocean”. These poems are not merely proof of time on Earth, but they are also proof of time at the fictitious Port Trakl, where lights and poets come to die. More than death, though, Port Trakl becomes a site of transformation within its deserted markets, trash-filled canals, red-lit streets, and seedy cantinas (my favorite bar being the one called “Sic transit gloria mundi”). In the end, the lone speaker wanders “the cloudy port of [his] heart” where “[his] eyes / were [his] only cargo” only to find “a tiny tomorrow” openings its doors.
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