Roberto Bolaño (1953 – 2003) is one of the best-known Chilean literary figures of the last fifty years.
This well-known writer and poet, who died in 2003, is especially recognized for having made novels such as “Distant Star” or “The Savage Detectives.” He is also known for being one of the main founders of the infrarealist movement, which sought the free expression of one’s own vital position regardless of the conventions and limits imposed by society.
The path of this author, although he perhaps received greater recognition for his novels, would begin with his lyrical works, mainly poems in which the author expressed his emotions and thoughts regarding a great diversity of topics. And in order to be able to observe and deepen his way of seeing things, in this article We present a brief selection of Roberto Bolaño’s poems
Below we leave you with a dozen of Roberto Bolaño’s poetic works, which speak to us about topics as diverse as love, poetry or death, from a sometimes tragic point of view.
1. Romantic dogs
At that time I was twenty years old and crazy. He had lost a country but had won a dream. And if he had that dream, the rest didn’t matter. Neither work nor pray, nor study at dawn with romantic dogs. And the dream lived in the emptiness of my spirit.
A wooden room, in darkness, in one of the lungs of the tropics. And sometimes I turned inside myself and visited the dream: a statue eternalized in liquid thoughts, a white worm writhing in love.
An unbridled love. A dream within a dream. And the nightmare told me: you will grow. You will leave behind the images of pain and the labyrinth and forget. But at that time grow might be a crime. I’m here, I said, with the romantic dogs and here I’m going to stay.
This poem, published in the book of the same name, tells us about youth and the madness and lack of control of the passions with which it is usually associated. We also see a possible reference to the fall of Chile into the hands of Pinochet and his emigration to Mexico.
2. Muse
She was more beautiful than the sun and I was not yet sixteen years old. Twenty-four have passed and he is still by my side. Sometimes I see her walking on the mountains: she is the guardian angel of our prayers. It is the dream that returns with the promise and the whistle. The whistle that calls us and that loses us. In her eyes I see the faces of all my lost loves.
Ah, Musa, protect me, I say, in the terrible days of incessant adventure. Never get away from Me. Watch my steps and the steps of my son Lautaro. Let me feel the tips of your fingers again on my back, pushing me, when everything is dark, when everything is lost. Let me hear the whistle again.
I am your faithful lover although sometimes sleep separates me from you. You are also the queen of dreams. You have my friendship every day and someday your friendship will pick me up from the wasteland of oblivion. Well, even if you come when I go, deep down we are inseparable friends.
Muse, wherever I go you go. I saw you in hospitals and in the line of political prisoners. I saw you in the terrible eyes of Edna Lieberman and in the alleys of the gunmen. And you always protected me! In defeat and in scratches.
In unhealthy relationships and cruelty, you were always with me. And even if the years go by and the Roberto Bolaño of the Alameda and the Cristal Bookstore transforms, he becomes paralyzed, he becomes sillier and older, you will remain just as beautiful. More than the sun and the stars.
Musa, wherever you go I go. I follow your radiant wake through the long night. Without caring about the years or the illness. Without caring about the pain or the effort I have to make to follow you. Because with you I can cross the great desolate spaces and I will always find the door that returns me to the Chimera, because you are with me, Muse, more beautiful than the sun and more beautiful than the stars.
The author tells us in this poem about his poetic inspiration, his muse, seeing it in various areas and contexts.
It rains and you say it’s like the clouds are crying. Then you cover your mouth and quicken your pace. As if those scrawny clouds were crying? Impossible. But then, where does that rage, that despair that will lead us all to the devil come from?
Nature hides some of its procedures in Mystery, its half-brother. So this afternoon that you consider similar to an afternoon of the end of the world, sooner than you think, will seem to you just a melancholic afternoon, an afternoon of solitude lost in memory: the mirror of Nature.
Or you will forget it. Neither the rain, nor the crying, nor your footsteps that echo on the cliff path matter; Now you can cry and let your image fade on the windshields of the cars parked along the Paseo Marítimo. But you can’t get lost.
This poetry reflects a feeling of strangeness, sadness, fear and helplessness derived from the observation of rain, which also symbolizes pain and tears. This is an element that frequently appears in the author’s work, which he also usually uses as a point of union between the real and the unreal.
4. Strange mannequin
Strange mannequin from a Metro store, what a way to observe and sense myself beyond every bridge, looking at the ocean or a huge lake, as if I expected adventure and love from it. And can a girl’s scream in the middle of the night convince me of the usefulness from my face or the moments are veiled, red-hot copper plates the memory of love being denied three times for the sake of another kind of love. And so we harden ourselves without leaving the aviary, devaluing ourselves, or we return to a very small house where a woman is waiting for us sitting in the kitchen.
Strange mannequin from a Metro store, what a way to communicate with me, single and violent, and sense me beyond everything. You only offer me buttocks and breasts, platinum stars and sparkling sex. Don’t make me cry on the orange train, or on the escalators, or suddenly leaving for March, or when you imagine, if you imagine, my steps as an absolute veteran again dancing through the gorges.
Strange mannequin from a Metro store, just as the sun and the shadows of the skyscrapers tilt, you will tilt your hands; Just as the colors and colored lights go out, your eyes will go out. Who will change your dress then? I know who will change your dress then.
This poem, in which the author dialogues with a mannequin from a subway store, tells us about a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, the search for sexual pleasure as a means of escape and the progressive fading away of illusion.
The great Roberto Bolaño, in his office.
5. The ghost of Edna Lieberman
All your lost loves visit you in the darkest hour. The dirt road that led to the asylum unfolds again like Edna Lieberman’s eyes, as only her eyes could rise above the cities and shine.
And Edna’s eyes shine again for you behind the ring of fire that was previously the dirt road, the path you walked at night, back and forth, over and over again, looking for her or perhaps looking for your shadow.
And you wake up quietly and Edna’s eyes are there. Between the moon and the ring of fire, reading her favorite Mexican poets. And have you read Gilberto Owen? Your lips say without sound, your breath says and your blood circulates like the light of a lighthouse.
But his eyes are the lighthouse that pierces your silence. His eyes are like the ideal geography book: the maps of pure nightmare. And your blood illuminates the shelves with books, the chairs with books, the floor full of stacked books.
But Edna’s eyes only look for you. Her eyes are the most sought after book. You understood it too late, but it doesn’t matter. In the dream you shake her hands again, and you no longer ask for anything.
This poem tells us about Edna Lieberman, a woman with whom the author was deeply in love but whose relationship soon broke up. Despite this, he would often remember her, appearing in a large number of the author’s works.
Pay attention to this, my son: the bombs were falling on Mexico City but no one noticed. The air carried the poison through the streets and open windows. You had just eaten and were watching cartoons on TV. I was reading in the next room when I knew we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I crawled to the dining room and found you on the floor.
We hug. You asked me what was happening and I didn’t say that we were in the death program but that we were going to start a journey, one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid. When he left, death did not even close our eyes. What are we, you asked me a week or a year later, ants, bees, wrong numbers in the great rotten soup of chance? We are human beings, my son, almost birds, public and secret heroes.
This brief problem reflects quite clearly how the author works on the theme of death and the dread and fear of it (in the context of a bombing), as well as the ease with which it can reach us. He also gives us a brief reflection on the topic of identity, who we are in a society that is increasingly individualistic but in which at the same time the person is less considered as such.
7. Teach me to dance
Teach me to dance, to move my hands among the cotton of the clouds, to stretch my legs trapped by your legs, to drive a motorcycle through the sand, to pedal a bicycle under avenues of imagination, to stay still like a bronze statue, to stay motionless smoking Delicates in ntra. corner.
The blue reflectors of the living room are going to show my face, dripped with mascara and scratches, you are going to see a constellation of tears on my cheeks, I am going to run away.
Teach me to stick my body to your wounds, teach me to hold your heart for a little while in my hand, to open my legs like flowers open for the wind for themselves, for the afternoon dew. Teach me to dance, tonight I want to keep up with you, open the roof doors for you, cry in your loneliness while from so high above we look at cars, trucks, highways full of police and burning machines.
Teach me to open my legs and put it in, contain my hysteria inside your eyes. Caress my hair and my fear with your lips that have uttered so much curse, so much shadow sustained. Teach me to sleep, this is the end.
This poem is the request of someone who is terrified, who is afraid but wants to live free, and who asks her companion to teach her to live freely, to free her and to make love to her in order to find peace.
Believe me, I’m in the middle of my room waiting for it to rain. I am alone. I don’t care whether or not I finish my poem. I wait for the rain, drinking coffee and looking out the window at a beautiful landscape of interior patios, with clothes hanging and still, silent marble clothes in the city, where there is no wind and in the distance you can only hear the hum of a color television , observed by a family who also, at this time, is drinking coffee gathered around a table.
Believe me: the yellow plastic tables unfold to the horizon line and beyond: towards the suburbs where they build apartment buildings, and a 16-year-old boy sitting on red bricks watches the movement of the machines.
The sky in the boy’s hour is a huge hollow screw with which the breeze plays. And the boy plays with ideas. With ideas and scenes arrested. Immobility is a transparent and hard mist that comes from his eyes.
Believe me: it is not love that is going to come,
but beauty with her stole of dead dawn.
This poem makes a reference to the arrival of sunlight at dawn, the stillness the awakening of ideas, although it also refers to the anticipation that something bad may come later.
9. Palingenesis
I was chatting with Archibald MacLeish at the “Los Marinos” bar in Barceloneta when I saw her appear, a plaster statue walking painfully on the cobblestones. My interlocutor also saw her and sent a waiter to look for her. For the first few minutes she didn’t say a word. MacLeish ordered seafood consommé and tapas, country bread with tomato and oil, and San Miguel beer.
I settled for a chamomile infusion and slices of whole wheat bread. I had to take care of myself, I said. Then she decided to speak: the barbarians advance, she whispered melodiously, a warped mass, pregnant with howls and oaths, a long night mantled to illuminate the marriage of muscles and fat.
Then his voice faded and he dedicated himself to eating the food. A hungry and beautiful woman, MacLeish said, an irresistible temptation for two poets, albeit of different languages, from the same untamed New World. I agreed with her without fully understanding her words and closed my eyes. When I woke up MacLeish was gone. The statue was there, in the street, its remains scattered between the uneven sidewalk and the old cobblestones. The sky, blue hours before, had turned black like an insurmountable resentment.
It’s going to rain, said a barefoot boy, shivering for no apparent reason. We looked at each other for a while: with his finger he indicated the pieces of plaster on the floor. Snow, he said. Don’t tremble, I responded, nothing will happen, the nightmare, although close, has passed without us barely touching.
This poem, whose title refers to the property of regenerating or being reborn once apparently dead, shows us how the poet dreams of the advance of barbarism and intolerance, which end up destroying beauty in turbulent times.
10. Hope
The clouds split. The dark opens, a pale furrow in the sky. That which comes from the bottom is the sun. The interior of the clouds, previously absolute, shines like a crystallized boy. Roads covered with branches, wet leaves, footprints.
I have remained still during the storm and now reality opens up. The wind carries groups of clouds in different directions. I thank heaven for having made love with the women I have loved. From the dark, pale furrow, they come
the days like walking boys.
This poem tells of hope, of being able to resist and overcome adversity to see the light again.
