The Night by Jaime Saenz

The Night
by Jaime Saenz
Translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson
Princeton University Press (2007)
Facing Pages
Nicholas Jenkins, Series Editor

The work of Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) was virtually unknown in the US until poets Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson released their translation of Saenz's selected poems, Immanent Visitor (pictured below), through the University of California Press in 2002.

The Night, the last poem Saenz wrote before his death (undoubtedly resulting from years of cocaine and alcohol abuse), is a book-length, tortuous, ghost-riddled meditation. The poem is divided into four parts--"The Night," "The Gatekeeper," "Interval," and "The Night." The night, the poem's central and controlling image, represents a series of opposites, paradoxes, and crossings-over: time and space, self and other, death spilling over into life and life into death, victim and attacker, the organic and the technological, the tyrannical and the marginal. The Night is sweeping and outward as well as claustrophobic and internal. Ultimately, the night is the battleground where one man confronts his own self, which contains contradictions and complexities so vast that death and life begin to blur. Here are four excerpts from the book, one from each of its sections:



from THE NIGHT, part 3


XXXXActually, the other side side of the night is a supremely esoteric realm,

XXXXand alcohol has conjured it.

XXXXNot anyone can pass to the other side of the night;

XXXXthe other side of the night is a forbidden dominion, and only the condemned enter there.

XXXXWhat is the nature of the night's other side?

XXXXTo put it bluntly, it is the nature of the night's other side

XXXXto sink into your spine and colonize your eyes, to see through them what it can't see on its own.

XXXXAnd then a very odd thing happens:

XXXXat a certain moment you begin to see the other side of the night,

XXXXand you realize with a start it is already inside of you...



from THE GATEKEEPER, part 3


XXXXWho is that, the one with bull's neck and lion's mane?

XXXXHe appears from nowhere in the doorway, this gatekeeper of the threshold, blocking those who would pass through.

XXXXThere is sunlight, and water, and air heavy with breathing,

XXXXand there are people.

XXXXThe air hums with the fluttering and fluttering and fluttering of beings.

XXXXAnd this humming, which resounds in every realm, rising to a roar,

XXXXis nevertheless a silence more profound than pure silence.

XXXXThere are two worlds, there are two lives, there are two deaths,

XXXX--whatever they call the One and Absolute doesn't exist.

XXXXThere are two faces, two edges, two abysses.


XXXXThe gatekeeper wearies...



from INTERVAL


XXXX...What's more, there were prominent and despicable technophiles among them,

XXXXand their one purpose was to devastate and murder.

XXXXOften, there were mass round-ups of children and of the most vigorous and healthy adolescents;

XXXXand these were corralled into the huge warehouses of the Customs Bureau, augmenting the supply of meat...



from THE NIGHT, part 3


XXXXThe space your body takes up in the world is equal to the space of the body into which someone has retreated;

XXXXand, if so, no one has any reason to bother or pester you;

XXXXin the space of your body, where you are absolute sovereign,

XXXXyou can stand on your head, create and decreate, and
wander at ease,

XXXXfree at last of a nightmarish world full of swarming specters and skeletons who siphoned your life.

XXXXIn any case, your dwelling, your city, your night, and your world boil down to your body;

XXXXand the one who dwells there is not you, but the body of your body.

XXXXFor the body that dwells in you is, in reality, you;

XXXXit's only that your body leaves off being you,

XXXXand passes into itself...



After reading Gander and Johnson's introduction to The Night, the only word to be uttered is paradox. Here are a few facts from Saenz's life: as a teenager he was a Nazi Youth member in Bolivia and gained military training in Germany during the late 30s; he later used his military experience to lead members of the working class (which included the indigenous Aymara) in a people's uprising against Bolivia's right-wing oligarchy in the early 50s; he was openly bisexual and portrayed sympathetic homosexual characters in his prose fiction; at one point he stole a leg from a cadaver and stowed it beneath his bed during a period in which he lived with his mother; he was so fearful of waking up in his coffin after he died that he insisted to his friends that they sever his carotid arteries after his death--apparently, this request was honored. These are just a few of the many nearly-unbelievable facts Gander and Johnson discuss in their introduction.

If you are unfamiliar with the titles in Princeton's Facing Pages series, then hop on to this link immediately. Not only does Facing Pages offer a diverse selection, it offers the option of either a paperback or a well-made hardcover. Ah, hardcover books...a dying format in the poetry world. All titles in this series are in print and ready for your bookshelf. For other excellent translation titles, check out the catalogs at Copper Canyon Press, Sheep Meadow Press, and Oberlin College Press.



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