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 The Oxford Book
of Latin American Poetry
A BILINGUAL ANTHOLOGY

EDITED BY

Cecilia Vicuna and

Ernesto Livon-Grosman

OXTORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

2009
 OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

Oxford University's objective of excellence
in research, scholarship, and education.
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South Korea Switzerland Thailand Tbrkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright ® 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

"An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics" © 2009 by Cecilia Vicuna
"A Historical Introduction to Latin American Poetry" © 2009
by Ernesto Livon-Grosman

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Oxford book of Latin American poetry: a bilingual
anthology / edited by Cecilia Vicufla and Ernesto Livon-Grosman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
Includes poems in various Latin American languages
with translations into English.
ISBN 978-0-19-512454-5
1. Latin American poetry.
2. Latin American poetry—Translations into English.
I. VicuAa, Cecilia. II. Livon-Grosman, Ernesto.
PQ7087.ESO897 2009
861.008'0972—dc21 2008046301

Frontispiece by Joaquin Torres Garcia,

from Nueva esaiela de arte del Urtigiiay,
published by Asoclacion de Arte Constructivo, 1946.
By permission of VEGAP.

123456789

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
 Contents

Acknowledgments xv
Preface xvii
An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics by Cecilia Vicuna xix
A Historical Introduction to Latin American Poetry
by Ernesto Livon-Grosman xxxiii

Anonymous Maya Scribes 1

Anonymous And All Was Destroyed (excerpt) 2
Anonymous Codex Cantares Mexicanos (excerpt) 4
Anonymous The Florentine Codex (excerpt) 6
Anonymous Inca Khipu 7
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Beantiftd Maiden 8
Anonymous Popol Vtih (excerpt) 9
Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga The Araucaniad (excerpt) 11
Mateo Rosas de Oquendo The Mestizo's Ballade 15
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala Cachiiiia 17
Festival of the Inca 19
Principal Accountant and Treasurer 20
Priests Who Force the Indians to Weave Cloth 21
Gregorio de Matos Define Your City 22
An Anatomy of the Ailments Suffered by the Body of the Republic,
in All Its Members, and Complete Definition of What Has Ever
Been the City of Bahia 23
To the City of Bahia Laying His Eyes First upon His Cit)' He Sees
That Its Merchants Are the Primary Cause of Its Ruin, Because
It Longs after Useless and Deceitfid Goods 26
To the Palefaces of Bahia 26
Upon Finding an Arm Taken from the Statue of the Christ Child
of Our Lady of the Wonders, Which Was Profaned by Unbelievers
at the Sea of Bahia 27
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz First Dream (excerpt) 28
This Coloured Counterfeit That Thou Beholdest 31
Tarry, Shadow of My Scomfitl Treasure 31
Diutunial Infirmity of Hope... 32
Villancico VIII (excerpt) 33
 Anonymous TJje Book ofCJiilatu Balam ofChitmayel (excerpt) 36
Anonymous The Book ofChilam Balam of Mani (excerpt) 37
Anonymous Grant Don fiian V Life 33
Eight-Line Acrostic 39
Simon Rodnguez Social Virtues and Illuminations 40
Anonymous Atahualpa Death Prayer 43
Bartolome Hidalgo New Patriotic Dialogue 49
Francisco Acuna de Figueroa To the Most Holy Virgin Mary 57
Multiform Salve (excerpt) 58
Alphabetical-Numerical Prophecy 60
Hilario Ascasubi The Slippery One 61
Antonio Goncalves Dias Song of Exile 65
Manuel Antonio Alvares de Azevedo Intimate Ideas (excerpt) 66
Sousandrade The Wall Street Inferno 71
Jose Hernandez Martin Fierro (excerpt) 77
Antonio de Castro Alves The Slave Ship (Tragedy on the Sea) (excerpt) 80
Rosa Araneda Cueca of the Lady Conductors 84
Jose Marti Waking Dream 87
Love in the City 87
Joao da Cruz e Sousa Lesbian 90
A/rfl 91
Jose Asuncion Silva Ars 92
Olavo Bilac Portuguese Language 93
Ruben Dario Love Your Rhythm 94
The Wandering Song 9S
EHEU! . 96
Nocturne
Philosophy
The Optimist's Salutation 98
Jose Juan Tablada Three Haikus: Willow, Cherimoya Tree, Bug 101

Ideogram Lantern (excerpt)

Havana Impressions
Jose Maria Eguren The Lady i
The Towers
r ’1
Favtla 106

Joaquin Torres Garcia America Invertida

City with No Name (excerpts)
Julio Herrera y Reissig Lunatic Tertulia (excerpt)

vl Contents
Augusto dos Anjos A Philosopher's Agony 114
Modem Buddhism 115
Pedro Kilkerry It's the Silence 116
Mare Vitae 117
Delmira Agustini To Eros 118
The Ineffable 119
The Intruder 119
Manuel Bandeira Anthology 120
Green-Black 121
My Last Poem 122
Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva Emotion and Advantage ofProven Depth 123
All Morning the Wind Has Spoken 123
Xul Solar "This Hades Is Fluid..(excerpt) 124
Gabriela Mistral Drops of Gall 128
Airflower 129
A Word 132
The Other Woman 133
Oswald de Andrade Brazilwood (excerpt) 135
The History of Brazil 137
Cannibal Manifesto (excerpts) 139
Oliverio Girondo The Mix 143
My Lumy 143
Totem Night 144
You Have to Look For It I45
Votive Offering 146
Cesar Vallejo The Black Heralds 148
Trilce (excerpts): XXIII, XXXVI 148
Black Stone on a White Stone 151
Telluric and Magnetic 152
I Stayed On to Wann Up the Ink inWhich I Drown 154
There Are Days, There Comes to Me an Exuberant, Political Hunger 155
Alfonsina Storni World of Seven Wells I57
An Ear I59
Vicente Huidobro Canto I, Altazor (excerpt) 161
Minuit 161

NonServiam
M^rio de Andrade Inspiration I69

Contents vll
 Nocturne 169
A Very Interesting Preface (excerpt) 171
Pablo de Rokha Song of the Old Male (excerpt) 175
Mana Sabina Life (excerpt) 178
Juan L. Ortiz Village on the River 183
Why? 187
Gamaliel Churata Khirkhilas (excerpt) 188
Raul Bopp Cobra Norato (excerpt) 192
Luis Pales Matos Prelude in Boriciia 195
Black Dance 197
Jorge Luis Borges The Golem 199
The Mythical Founding of Buenos A ires 202
Borges and I 203
Limits 205
Rosamel Del Valle Canticle IX 207
Magic Love 207
Cecilia Meireles Pyrargyrite Metal, 9 210
Song 211
Speech 212
Second Rose Motif 212
Jose Gorostiza Death without End (excerpt) 213
Elegy 215
Pauses I 21S
Carlos Drummond de Andrade This Is That 216
A Passion for Measure 219
In the Middle of the Way 220
F 220
Nicolas Guillen Sensemayd 221
Son Number 6 223
My Last Name I, a Family Elegy 225
Xavier Villaurrutia L.A. Nocturne: The Angels 229
Nocturne: Fear 231
Cesar Moro To Wait 233
Trafalgar Square 233
Pablo Neruda Melancholy Inside Families 234
Wfl/k/n^AroMnJ 236
Right, Comrade, It's the Hour of the Garden 238

vlli Contents
Aurelio Arturo Climate 239
Lullaby 241
Omar Caceres Mansion of Foam 242
Deserted Blue 243
The I's Illumination 244
Visitor Extremes 246
Martin Adan Aloysius Acker Is Coming into the World 248
IV/t/ioizt Time Signature, Hurrying Ad Lib/Played Freely, etc. 253
Jose Lezama Lima T/iow^/its in Havana (excerpt) 254
Fifes, Epiphany, Goats 257
Death of Time 259
Enrique Molina The Way It Must Be 261
Hue 261
Aquatic Rite 265
Pablo Antonio Cuadra God Creates the Andes 267
The Myth of the Jaguar 269
Octavio Paz Sunstone (excerpt) 271
Here 274
Exclamation 274
Altar 275
Joaquin Pasos Warsong of the Things (excerpt) 276
Nicanor Parra No President's Statue Escapes 279
1973 2S0
U.S.A. 280
The Individual's Soliloquy 281
Violeta Parra Easy for Singing 2B6
Dumb, Sad, and Thoughtfid 287
Goddamn the Empty Sky 289
Gonzalo Rojas Von Shouldn't Copy Pound 292
CJedeslum Qedeshoth 294
Cesar Davila Andrade Bulletin and Elegy of Indian Enslavement (excerpt) 296
Joao Cabral do Melo Neto Education by Stone 300
Tale of an Architect 301
The Unconfessing Artist 301
A Knife All Blade 302
Olga Orozco Vbnob’o//s on Time 304
The Obstacle 307

Contents ix
 Idea Vilarifio Metamorphosis 308
Poor World 309
A Guest 309
I Did Not Love You 310
Jaime Saenz Anniversary of a Vision (excerpt) 311
Juan Sanchez Pelaez From the Fleeting and Permanent (excerpt) 317
Dark Bond 319
Jorge Eduardo Eielson Mana's First Death 320
Paracas Pyramid Perfonnance, 1974 324
K/Jipu, 1965 324
Carlos Martinez Rivas Two Murals: U.S.A, (excerpts) 325
Gyula Kosice Portable Madi Dictionary (excerpts) 328
The MADI Movement MADI 329
Ernesto Cardenal Death of Thomas Merton (excerpt) 330
Rosario Castellanos Livid Light 335
Silence around an Ancient Stone 336
Malinche 337
Apolonio Alves dos Santos Antonio Conselheiro
and the Canudos Rebellion 339
Blanca Varela I Bury My Hand in the Sand 343
Exercises 343
Final Scene 344
Family Seaet 345
Curriculum Vitae 345
Decio Pignatari Hear the Earth 346
Drink Coca Cola 346
Carlos German Belli Tortilla 347
Sestina ofMea Culpa 348
I Trust Now in Nothing 350
Francisco Madariaga Black Cold fara 351
The Trivial fungle 354
Lednidas Lamborghini TIjc Displaced Applicant (excerpt) 35S
Eva Perdn at the Stake (excerpt) 359
amereida amereida (excerpt) 363
Edgardo Antonio Vigo Object-Poems 366
Enrique Lihn T/ie Father's Monologue with His Infant Son 367
Those Who Are Going to Die Can't Wait 372

X Contents
Haroldo de Campos The Ear's Pavilion 373
Bom and Dies 373
Galdxias (excerpt): Flower Blower 374
Galdxias (excerpt): Reza calla y trabaja 376
Galdxias (excerpt): Inscribedcorpse 379
Juan Gelman CDLVI 381
CDLXXXI 382
XDV 384
Augusto de Campos Eggtangle 385
Eye for an Eye 387
To Put On a Mask 387
Jaime Jaramillo Escobar The Leather Telegram 388
Lorenzo Ramos The Foreigners Lie about What They Want 391
Antonio Martinez The Words ofPa'i Antonio 394
Aurelio Frez Mother, Here We Are 400
Alfredo Silva Estrada Grape Harvests 403
The Dwellers (excerpt) 404
Gerardo Deniz Meditate 406
The Authoritarian School and How a Respectable Literary
Genre Was Bom. 407
Threat 408
Romulus Augustidus 409
Sexologic 410
Isabel Fraire A Moment Captured by a Japanese Painter... 411
Untitled 412
"Housing Complex " 413
Sergio Mondragon Exodus of the Gods (excerpt) 415
Susana Thenon Poem with Simultaneous Translation Spanish-Spanish 420
Nuptial Song 422
Roque Dalton No, I Wasn't Always This Ugly 424
The Country—Sir Thomas 426
Toadstools VIII 427
Alejandra Pizarnik Nocbimal Singer 429
From the Other Side 429
From a Copy of "Les Chants de Maldoror" 429
430
Useless Frontiers 43O

Contents xl
 Oscar Hahn Restriction of Nocturnal Movements 431
Conjurer's Tract 432
Vision of Hiroshima 433
Eugenio Monte jo The World's Practice
A Bird's Earthness
Good-Bye to the Twentieth Century 437
Osvaldo Lamborghini The Most Amusing Song of the Devil
(A Prose Work Halfin Verse, No joke ...) (excerpt) 438
Jose Kozer A Meeting at Cho-Fu-Sa
Kafka Reborn
Rodolfo Hinostroza Contra natura (excerpt) 446

Antonio Cisneros The Dead Conquerors

Poem on fonah and the Disalienated 450
Appendix to the Poem on Jonah and the Disalienated 451
Juan Luis Martinez Remarks Concerning the Exuberant Activity of
"Phonetic Confabulation" or "The Language of Birds" ... 452
Breathing House, Almost the (Author's) Little House 453
c .
Ear 454
The New Novel: The Poet as Supennan 454
The Structure of Political Thought 456

Gloria Gervitz Migrations (excerpt)

Soledad Farina Everything Calm, Immobile
Which to Paint Which First
Not Time Yet
Where the Yellow
Paulo Leminski Catatau (excerpt)
465
Metamorphosis (excerpt)
Maria Mercedes Carranza Homeland
A71
Heels over Head with Life
I'm Afraid
Canto 17: Cumbal
Canto 18: Soacha
Canto 3: Dabeiba
Arturo Carrera It Wasn't in Sicily, It Wasn't Here (excerpt)
Cecilia Vicuna Physical Portrait
The Earth Listening to Us
London Khipu
Instan (excerpt)

xll Contents
 Wilson Bueno Mar paragitayo (excerpt) 482
Nestor Perlongher Tuyd 486
Mme. Schoklender 487
Daisy Zamora Radio Sandino (excerpt) 489
Raul Zurita Inn (excerpt) 493
Neither Fear Nor Sadness (Desert Writing) 495
My God Is Hunger (Sky Writing) 495
Coral Bracho Water's Lubricious Edges 496
Its Dark Force Curving 498
Give Me, Earth, Your Night 499
Elvira Hernandez The Fiag of Chile (excerpt) 501
Reina Maria Rodriguez Twilight's Idol 504
Emeterrio Cerro Miss Murkiness (excerpt) 507
Jorge Santiago Perednik Shock of the Lenders (excerpt) 508
Humberto Ak'abal Stones 512
Advice 512
Effort 512
Navel 512
Fireflies 513
Wa/ker 513
Learning 514
Buzzard 515
Elikura Chihuailaf I Still Want to Dream in Tins Valley 516
For I Am the Power of the Nameless 517
Myriam Moscona Black Ivory (excerpt) 518
Josely Vianna Baptista A Sound ofAncient, Faded Flows 521
Traces 522
The Grail 523
Xunka' Utz'utz' Ni' Prayer So My Man Won't Have to Cross the Line 524
Loxa Jimenes Lopes Pexi Kola Magic 525
Maria Ernandes Kokov T/ie Talking Box Speaks 526
Tonik Nibak Dance of the Perfiimed Woman 528
Cristina Rivera-Garza Third World (excerpt) 529
Juan Gregorio Regino Cantares 523

List of Translators 537

Source Acknowledgments 549

Contents vlli
 Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to the Latin American poets and their counterparts, the
translators—most of them poets in their own right. We are honored to present
their pioneering work. These poet-translators represent a lineage that stands for
a new sensibility that does not subsume the original into English but creates par­
allel poems that allow both poetries to interact. When available, we reprinted
masterworks in translation but, to a large extent, we commissioned new works
for this volume. This book is modeled on the anthologies of world poetry cre­
ated by Jerome Rothenberg, such as his landmark Technicians of the Sacred; his
vision spurred us to take one step further by including indigenous languages
here. Many other translators such as John Bierhorst, Clayton Eshleman, Pierre
Joris, Suzanne Jill Levine, Nathaniel Tarn, Dennis Tedlock, and Eliot Weinberger
were important to us.
A new generation of poet-translators has now joined them and we are grate­
ful to them for taking risks with multilingual and indigenous works that had
to be translated from intermediate languages such as Spanish and Portuguese.
They contributed greatly to the experimental and inclusive nature of our
anthology, and several helped us with selections as well. In this capacity, we
especially thank Rosa Alcala, Odile Cisneros, Forrest Gander, Jen Hofer, Gary
Racz, and Molly Weigel.
Ours was a long and often difficult process, enriched by the conversa­
tion and exchange with many poets throughout the Americas. We thank
Charles Bernstein who brought us together as editors and was, as always, a
staunch supporter of the project. Regis Bonvicino contributed a pre-selection
of Brazilian poetry that became the basis for our Portuguese-language sec­
tion. This anthology would not have been possible without help from col­
leagues and friends: Cecilia de Torres provided the first impulse; Andres Ajens
and Reynaldo Jimenez inspired us; Dwayne Carpenter, Soledad Farina, Jorge
Fondebrider, Silvia Guerra, David Jackson, Edgar O'Hara, Elvira Hernandez,
Luis Vargas Saavedra, Jussara Salazar, Paul Statt, and Lila Zemborain gave their
support; Susana Haydu, Reinaldo Laddaga, and Jorge Santiago Perednik, with
intelligence and deep knowledge, helped us with some of our most difficult
questions; Nina Gerassi-Navarro was the extraordinary interlocutor she always
is; James O'Hern offered unbound solidarity and vision; Jennifer Baker, Renato
Gomez, Matthew D'Orsi, Esteban Mallorga, Jennifer Unter, and Macarena
Urzua assisted with research; Lisa Bernabei, Yolanda Blanco, Angela Ruiz, and
Ian Watt helped with biographies; and Christian Coleman and Erica and Julia
Rooney contributed long hours of typing.
Several institutions supported this project: SUNY at Albany, the Whitney
Humanities Center at Yale University, and the Romance Languages Department

XV
 at Harvard University; a special thanks to Boston College for its overall support
of this book project and the funding of several research assistants.
Finally, we thank our editors at Oxford—Elda Rotor in the early period
and Cybele Tom in the final stretch—whose insight and support were crucial to
this enterprise.

xvi Acknowledgments
 Preface

Latin America has a complex and prolific poetic tradition that is little known
outside its geographic and linguistic boundaries. Although a few poets such as
Borges, Neruda, and Paz have become emblematic of its richness, many voices
remain unheard. The brilliance of their work calls for a cultural context, a way
to reconnect them to the vast contradictory universe from which they arose.
Establishing those connections was our challenge as editors.
"Latin America" is a name coined in the nineteenth century, referring only
to the last five hundred years but the historical depth of its culture, and the
roots of its poetry are much older and are found on both sides of the Atlantic. In
the Americas, written literature is two thousand years old and oral poetry may
go back as far as ten thousand years. The fusion of the multiple languages and
cultures gives Latin American voices a new specificity that is neither the origi­
nal one nor that of the colonizers. To present the richness.of Latin America's
linguistic creations in a brief anthology demands a new organizing principle, a
broader frame of reference to fully embrace them.
The continual clash of cultures and languages in Latin America, brought
about by the European conquest, created a "verba criolla," in Jose Lezama Lima's
words—a verbal mix, a mestizo poetics resplendent with contradiction and lin­
guistic experimentation. To present this dynamic mestizaje, or hybridity, as well
as the continuity of the experimental tradition, became our goal in selecting
work. To this end we included a great number of poets not yet well known
in the English language. Readers may, therefore, notice a de-emphasis of the
more popular poets, which should not be construed as a judgment of their
significance but rather as a by-product of bringing attention to others not fre­
quently translated. Indeed, many of the poets represented here have never been
included in a poetry anthology in English.
To compile Latin American poetry from the standpoint of mestizaje is to
reconstitute a tradition that has, until now, segregated poetic work into two
isolated halves: oral and indigenous poetry on one side, and poetry written in
the "official" languages (i.e., Spanish and Portuguese) on the other. This system
ignored or marginalized poetic practices that, in our view, are at the core of a
long cultural tradition. A similar kind of displacement took place in relation
to experimental poetics that has been, for the most part, circumscribed to the
historical avant-garde at the expense of a larger practice that dates as far back as
pre-Columbian times.
In Western terms, a constellation is constructed from star to star. In the
Andes, a dark constellation is the negative space between stars. The generative
force of the cosmos, the space of creation, lies in the gaps between stars. This
constellation, as well as the Mexican concept of nepantla, becomes a metaphor

xvll
 for the space between languages where mestizo poetry comes into being. Our
anthology focuses on the creative potential of this undefined space where the
vernacular inventions and hybrid forms are born. Latin American poetry often
blurs the lines between the arts, overlapping into the visual arts, sound, perfor­
mance, and mixed languages and genres.
The anthology begins with a pre-Columbian image of a female scribe, fol­
lowed by the native version of the conquest. It maps the evolution of the fusion
of European and indigenous as they assume their place in world literature. The
selection is particularly aware of the great revival of poetry in indigenous lan­
guages as well as a vibrant experimentation in different languages. In addition,
more female poets have joined a field long dominated by male voices.
We present two separate introductions. The first, on mestizo poetics, offers
background to the creative principles underlying the poetic ideas of the ancient
Americas and how they influenced later works. This is followed by a histori­
cal account of Latin America's poetry that connects the vernacular experimen­
tal tradition with its international context. The chronological presentation
of poets by birthdate should allow readers to further contextualize individual
works within different historical periods.
This anthology differs from most in that it includes many divergent poetries
that may present readers with new and controversial perspectives. Our aim is
to present the multiple poetics of Latin America over five hundred years in the
hope that readers will experience a richer understanding of the whole.

The Editors
Spring 2009

xvlli Preface
 An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics
Cecilia Vicuna

Latin American poetry begins with Malintzin, the Nahua slave girl who became
the "lengiia," the interpreter and concubine of Hernan Cortes.’ Forced to speak
in the language of the conquerors, she invented a way of speaking Spanish
with a native intonation that, within a few generations, became the matrix of
mestizo poetics. Her ambiguous role in the conquest is widely depicted in the
native accounts, where she is both a traitor who enabled the foreigners and a
powerful mediator who influenced events. But in Spanish accounts her role is
insignificant. The two ways of writing the story sets the stage for the future: in
the course of the next five hundred years she becomes the chingada, the vio­
lated mother of all mestizos.
Mestizo—cur-dog, mongrel, mixed blood—has been a derogatory name
viciously wielded since the beginning of colonization when mestizos were hated
both by the indigenes they were displacing and by the foreign rulers attempting
to keep power.2 In contemporary Latin America, the battle for its meaning still
rages. In daily life it is still an insult: racial prejudice prevents most Latin Ameri­
cans who share Indian roots from recognizing their own mestizaje. In literature
and politics it has two faces: it is used to subsume and efface the indigenous
presence and, conversely, to honor the indigenous contribution to the "mes­
tizaje" that epitomizes Latin America.
The Chilean novelist and critic Jorge Guzman suggests the controversy stems
from the tendency to confuse racial content with its cultural connotations. For
him, all Latin Americans are cultural mestizos, and the creative energy behind
the best artists emerges from this "mestizaje." But Guzman's view is by no means
universal. The mixed roots of Latin American creativity are readily admitted in
the visual arts and in music but rarely in the verbal arts.
In this introduction I use "mestizo poetics"—a loaded phrase—to refer to works
that emerged from the clash of cultures in Latin America, the dialogic exchange
between two ethos—one based on separation and the other on interconnected­
ness. Fully aware that neither represents a monolithic reality, I call the former
European and the latter indigenous. What matters most here is the different place
poetry has in each. In the recent European tradition, poetry^'s role in society has
decreased steadily. In indigenous societies, poetry still participates in all aspects of
life. The tension between these two views gives Latin American poetry its force.

The first self-named mestizo, the sixteenth-century Peruvian historian Inca

Garcilaso de la Vega, wrote for a Spanish audience but in a language meant to
be read aloud to his indigenous constituency. Mingling sources and genres, his
multivocal work Comentarios reales tells the story of the Incas from many per­
spectives. Four centuries later, the poet Cesar Vallejo, also a mestizo, or cholo,^

xtx
 was inspired by Garcilaso's masterpiece to develop a new poetic language based
on a mestizo syntax and intonation. Today, Vallejo is considered one of the
great poets of South America. Yet his achievement and the many hybrid works
that came between Garcilaso and Vallejo have not dispelled the prejudice that
largely denies the acknowledgment of mestizaje in Latin American poetry.
To understand the complex forces at play we must return to the moment
when the European and indigenous worldviews first collided. This was a clash so
powerful that it destroyed Amerindian cultures, giving birth to modernity. The
conquest of America engendered Europe's cultural and economic development.
The Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel calls this "the myth of modernity,"
"a particular myth of sacrificial violence" that rationalizes European "superior­
ity" and its right to conquer, while occluding the rights of the "other." In his
view, its emergence began a process of "concealment or misrecognition of the
non-European" that subsumed the contribution of the peoples of Asia, Africa,
and the Americas to world culture."* As a result, the destruction of native cul­
tures was never seen as a loss, only a necessary by-product of progress—a view
that persists today. Challenging this Eurocentric perspective Dussel proposes a
new understanding of modernity as an evolving co-creation borne out of the
interaction between Europe and the colonies. This insight provides the frame­
work for our discussion.
In 1492, the Europeans did not arrive at a wilderness but to a densely popu­
lated land with advanced civilizations and, in the case of Mesoamerica, a literary
tradition two thousand years older than that of Europe.^ Within a few decades
it was destroyed. The violence of colonization, war, disease, and enslavement
wiped out more than ten million natives. Given the magnitude of destruction
and the cultural shock of the forcible conversion to Christianity and system­
atic replacement of native languages with Spanish and Portuguese, it is remark­
able that indigenous peoples and cultures survived at all. Today, five hundred
languages are still spoken in Latin America. Although many are endangered,
they enrich the whole with their diversity. Despite persecution, the indigenous
actively participated in the co-creation of the emerging culture. Their creativity
infused the new Latin America with an unacknowledged indigenous substrate,
which became the basis for mestizo poetics.
John Bierhorst, noted translator and scholar of Native American literature,
wrote thaf^he traditional art of the New World, has remained a whole art,
capable of combining the aesthetic, the sacred, and the medicinal in varying
proportions."^ This capacity to adapt and change while holding on to its core
values enabled the ancient arts to withstand the conquest by shifting and mor­
phing into new forms. In poetry, the new forms evolved out of specific coricep^
tions of sound, visual form, and space.
j" - - - _ ■

C^ound^^
Sound has been associated since ancient times with the birth of the cosmos and
the life force. In South American indigenous religions, sound participates in

XX An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics

the creation of time and is associated with change, passage, and renewal. The
Baniwa of the Brazilian rainforest say "sound is a byproduct of the first change,
an excretion of Primordial Being." In fact, they see all forms of reproduction as
a "communication of sounds." Language, poetry, and song are forms of repro­
duction. A song is a new form of being. Sounds open the earth, fertilizing fields
and wild fruits. In a ritual context "songs effect the very changes they signify
since their performance marks the time and places of passage in which cul­
ture renews itself."’' With each ritual performance the creation myth is reexpe­
rienced. Through song and dance people enter the cosmic exchange of life and
death. The exchange is healing as it modulates the shifting relations between
people, the environment, and the gods.
In contemporary oral cultures this ancient model has remained vibrant
through multiple local variations. In many regions this process was com­
pounded by the arrival of African slaves. Each community seeks differentiation
by developing its own sonic aesthetics, ajormalism that carries ontological sig­
nificance as sound is directly associated with mythical events.
The Popol Viih of the K'iche' Maya of Guatemala is one of the few written
records we have of the pre-Columbian view of poetry and song. In this creation
myth, the world is formed in a performance by the gods: "They say 'Earth.' It
arose suddenly just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming, unfolding." But the
gods felt there would be "no bright praise for our work, our design, until the
rise of the human work, the human design." The gods wanted to "be called
upon, to be recognized" for they say "our recompense is in words." But not
just any words, they wanted poetry, a reflection of their own creative per­
formance; words uttered in parallel pairs to echo the male/female, sky/earth
union of the cosmos: "at uk'iix kaj, at iik'ux ulew" (thou. Heart of the Sky;
thou. Heart of the Earth).
The Popol Viih is not just the story of how' people and the world came into
being, but it also, explains the complex role that poetry plays in the dialogic
exchange. Once the gods hear the poetry of the first humans, they are alarmed
by its dangerous lack of humility. The gods decided to cloud the human vision,
blinding them "as the face of the mirror is breathed upon." From then on,
humans walked in darkness and prayed in lament, "Look at us, listen to us."
To recover their lost connection they became dreamers and diviners "givers of
praise, givers of respect." They learned how to read and write, creating books
that are ilob'al (instruments for seeing), which were performed to cut through
darkness and actualize the power of poetry in the moment."
In keeping with the mythical view of sound, intonation of specific tones
became the key medium for spiritual communication. Through carefully modu-
lated tones in speech and song, ritual participants enter a resonant state of con­
sciousness where mutual creation and renewal occurs. This realignment with
the universe is an act of critical importance for the individual, the community,
^and the earthltself?Awaiting this aural nutrition, the earth listens and responds.
Its well-bein'^nd fertility depend on the poems and songs performed for her.

Cecilia X’icurta xxl

 In tonal languages (and most indigenous languages are tonal), tone is the
basis of poetic composition. Complex accentuation and variations of tonality
and syllable length play a crucial role, as rhythm becomes tone through repeti­
tion.’ Today, Maya K'iche poets still specialize in sonic performances as Hum­
berto Ak'abal does, combining song and spoken word in ways that echo the
ancient Maya compositions created in parallel syntax and complex combina­
tions of pitch and pauses.
Although the indigenous conception of sound is not well known in the gen­
eral culture of Latin America, intonation matters because Spanish and Portu­
guese are spoken with a variety of indigenous and African accents. The rhythms
and speech patterns of Chilean Spanish denote the underlying sound of Mapu-
dungun; the Spanish of Peru and Bolivia reflects its Quechua/Aymara base; the
Spanish of Paraguay is inflected by Guarani; the Spanish of Buenos Aires sounds
like Italian as a result of nineteenth-century immigration; the Spanish of the
Caribbean carries the presence of Bantu and other African languages, and so on
* throughout the Americas.
Since early colonization some poets have been fully conscious of the creative
potential of local sounds. In the seventeenth century, Sor Juana composed mixed-
language villancicos (Christmas carols) creating sonic snapshots of colonial Mexico.
In the seventeenth century, Gregorio de Matos captured the street-talk of the city
of Bahia. In the nineteenth century, Jose Marti, inspired by popular music, com­
bined the legacy of the Spanish medieval lyrics with a Caribbean syntax and into­
nation. In the twentieth century, the process intensified, and a wider spectrum of
sounds was captured in writing. Mario de Andrade brasilized Portuguese, writing
in the fala brasileira, and Jorge Luis Borges creolized Spanish to "converse with the
world" in a new criollismo (even though he later decried this early choice).
Other poets wrote of the special connective qualities of sound. In one of her
most abstract poems, Gabriela Mistral meets "Poetry" herself, whom she names
"The Woman of the Meadow." "Poetry" demands "colorless flowers" that the poet
cuts "from the soft air" of fragrant sound. Alfonsina Storni finds in her own body
I "wells of sounds/... where the spoken word/and unspoken word/echo," and Enri-
\ queta Arvelo Larriva thanks those "who left me listening for an untamed chant."

Attending to tonal diversity, this anthology emerged from the desire to hear a
I different history, one that would honor poets who openly incorporated native
I intonations or mixed languages, and who were marginalized and left out of the
I canon. It is no accident that Sor Juana's villancicos constitute the most ignored
and unappreciated portion of her art; they reveal her mestizaje. Respect fof
the work of Gregorio de Matos only came three hundred years after his death-
Sousandrade's multilingual Oguessa errante, a critical bridge between nineteenth'
and twentieth-century poetics, is largely unknown in Brazil. The pioneering
work of Gamaliel Churata, an Andean avant-garde poet who mixed Quechua/
Aymara, and Spanish in his masterpiece El pez de oro, has yet to be fully acknowl­
edged. Even Cesar Vallejo was ridiculed by his peers and died in poverty.

xxll An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics

 With the industrial revolution came the increasing popularity of the news­
paper. Its colloquial language and fragmented visual layout began to affect
literature. Some key writers and poets, influenced by newspapers, disrupted
established literary practices creating a new hybridization of genres. Two pio­
neering examples are Simon Rodriguez and Sousandrade. Haroldo de Campos
observes that newspapers introduced the discontinuous alternative language of
conversation and the prosaic elements that nurtured the "colloquial-ironic."
This resulted in a series of transitional forms that bridged the gap between lit­
erature and popular speech. For the Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan, the
multilayered arrangement of newspapers approximates it to oral culture. In the
Northern Hemisphere, Edgar Allan Poe was the first to apply this kaleidoscopic
technique in the symbolist poem and the detective story. In these works, Poe
displayed a new way of listening to the rhythm of speech, which in turn influ­
enced Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme.’”
The impact of this aesthetic revolution was immediately felt in Latin Amer­
ica, liberating poets like Marti and Ruben Dario to hear the actual patterns of
Latin American speech while unaware of the pioneering work of Rodriguez and
Sousandrade. The Cuban poet Jose Lezama Lima wrote that Mallarme restored
the power of silence as the matrix of speech, returning to syllables their ancient
identities as gods of nature. The Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro saw himself
as "an echoing translator" of the powers of nature. In his contradictory mani­
festos, he proposes to create new realities through words and sounds. His cre-
acionistno was inspired both by the European avant-garde and the shamanic
language of the Aynnara. He heard an Aymara Indian say "The poet is a God.
Don't sing about rain, poet. Make it rain!" In the last canto of his long poem
"Altazor," language becomes pure sound. His writing in turn influenced Mario
de Andrade who expanded Huidobro's meta-linguistic approach, closing the
gap between the oral and the written. Oswald de Andrade took the concept
•even further, turning the relationship between colonized and colonizer on its
^head by proposing a synthesis of the two: antropofagia. In these manifestos a
inew integration of poetry and theory emerges: the patriarchal European heri-
ftage is desacralized and indianness is reinvented.
Yet, even as these poets are celebrated, the indigenous undercurrents in their
work are often ignored. For example, the shamanic component in Huidobro's
imanifestos is overlooked and Oswald de Andrade's famous aphorism, "Tupi
or not tupi," is read simply as a pun on Shakespeare, forgetting that in Tupi-
(Guarani, one of the main linguistic families of the Americas, "the very' word
tupi means sound standing upright." "For the Tupi-Guarani, being and language
aare the same thing. Word means sound and soul."" '

Visual Form

Many visual systems of communication evolved in the ancient Americas based

oon the interplay between writing, drawing, and reading. In these sy'stems, mean-
img depends on the active participation of the reader. The best-known example

Cecilia Vicuna xxiil

 is Maya logosyllabic writing where both writer and reader recombine signs in
elaborate substitutions, multiple associations, and wordplay. *2 (See the discus­
sion of Haroldo de Campos below.) Flexibility of meaning is important for an
oral culture where memory is not seen as fixed but is an ongoing creative phe­
nomenon, renewed and transformed at each reading.
The writing tradition of Mesoamerica was fully alive by the time Europeans
arrived in 1519. The Mexicas cherished writing as a manifestation of higher
civilization and were astonished to see that the Spaniards also had books. Soon
after the conquest the Catholic Church and colonial authorities, threatened
by native forms of knowledge, prohibited indigenous writing. Similarly, Maya
books were burned and only four survive. Native authors, however, preserved
the contents of some books by transcribing them clandestinely as in the Popol
Vuh and the Chilam Balat7i. The church introduced alphabetic writing and used
illustrated religious manuals to indoctrinate the Indians. But the writing of the
Mexica, the "Painted Books," survived for a few decades as mestizo art camou­
flaged within European style and script. When colonial alphabetic script became
dominant, Mexica and Maya writing traditions disappeared, having lost their
visual component. In the pre-Columbian Andes, people did not write in the
^Western sense but recorded knowledge in khipus by weaving words into knot-
Ited cords (see later discussion). In the early years of the colony, khipus were
[ allowed to coexist with European script, but by the end of the sixteenth cen­
tury they were forbidden. Felipe Guaman Poma, one of the first native authors
to adopt writing, imitated the structure of European indoctrination manuals
but reversed their content in his famous Coronica, a thousand-page letter to the
King of Spain denouncing the abuse by colonial authorities. The letter was com­
posed by combining text and drawings.
After the suppression of indigenous writing systems, a different kind of
visual writing emerged in the Americas; ironically, it came from Europe. During
the Baroque period, in the eighteenth century, the acrostic, a European form
of visual poetry with medieval roots, was adopted by the Viceroyal courts and
widely practiced. In the late eighteenth century, Simon Rodriguez created his
"painted ideas," a system of philosophical aphorisms in visual typographical
layout that prefigures later poetical experiments. His purpose was to reflect his
thought process as a way to empower the readers with a new consciousness of
language. In the nineteenth century, the interaction between word and image
was popularized by the art of the illustrated broadside. Imported from Spain, it
became a vehicle for poesi'a popular in Latin America. In addition, the broadsides
provided a meeting place for the oral and the written tradition where peasants
migrating to the cities expressed their views. Posted on walls, or sold in the
streets, the broadsides had a far larger circulation than "cultivated" poetry. We
include examples from Chile and Brazil.
In the early twentieth century, Jose Juan Tablada integrated his studies of
Aztec hieroglyphics and Chinese ideograms into a new ideographic poetry.
Vicente Huidobro, in direct contact with the European vanguard, created and

xxlv An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics

exhibited his "painted poems" in Paris in 1922. In the same decade Xul Solar
produced watercolors that functioned simultaneously as painting, writing, and
musical score. In the 1930s, Joaquin Torres Garcia's grafismo constnictivo united
writing and drawing in a single system based on the parallel he saw between
constructivism and Amerindian cultures. In the early 1950s, Concrete poetry
emerged simultaneously in Brazil and in Europe. Out of the dialogue and
exchange between these poets, an international visual poetry movement arose
and is still going strong.
Concrete poets defined the visual poem as a kind of verbal "constellation in
space." They regarded the page as a space where creation and invention hap­
pens simultaneously for author and reader. Concrete poet Haroldo de Campos
describes it as "a coinformation"; "the poet determines the play-area, the field
of force, and the new reader joins in" to complete the poem. This idea recalls
the ancient Maya writing system, now undergoing a revival of interest in Guate­
mala. Maya scholar Dennis Tedlock observes that the ancient Maya artists "cre­
ated graphic art that liberates the glyphs from linguistic directionality, causing
them to linger on the threshold between sight and sound."*’
Tedlock's point suggests that indigenous Maya artists and poets are the for­
gotten forebears of today's visual and Concrete poetry. In these systems, words
are not only writing but are also "seen as a painting" and "listened to as music."
Poetic possibilities expand as the visual and sonic dimensions allow full partici­
pation of the reader. Visual and Concrete poetry are modern manifestations of
indigenous tradition—tenacious in surviving the conquest and now the digi­
tal age—^tracing a true mestizo trajectory. It should be noted that the Concrete
poets of the 1950s were not conscious of this connection. The scholarship on
ancient Maya script was not yet available.

Poetry in Space

Space is a conceptual construct specific to each culture. Poetry is not gener­

ally associated with space but in the ancient Americas, its conceptualization
played a crucial role in the creation of poetry and meaning. In the West, space
is interpreted as a boundless three-dimensional expanse. In the Inca cosmol­
ogy, time and space create each other in a mutual interaction. For the Campa
of the Andes, space and the qualities of earth and sky are perceptions inhabit­
ing the realm of the mind.*'* For the Cashinahua of the rainforest, the world is
a magical or supernatural place irreducible to schema; any attempt would be a
dangerous oversimplification of significance and meaning.*’ In indigenous cul­
ture meaning creates space and is entangled with the richness of life. The cre-
ative~^otential of meaning is believed to be critical to the survival of In^ and
culture. Therefore, diversity of meaning is maintainedthrough variatiorrahd'a
multiplicity of media such as gesture, sound, dance, and weaving, in addition
to the traditional media of painting, ceramics, sculpture, and architecture.
As mentioned before, in the Andes people did not write but wove mean-
iing into knotted cords, the khipu.” The interaction between weaver and cord

Cecilia Vicufta XXV

 creates meaning. The knot is witness to the exchange. The word "Quechua,”
the most widespread language of the Andes, means "twisted grass." Language
itself is seen as weaving, so they "wrote" with threads.
After the conquest, when new authorities seized the land, the khipu system
of knowledge had to be destroyed because it represented the cultural identity of
the people and contained the record of the communal ownership of the land-
But the communal sense of space embedded in the khipu remained.
The khipu, and its virtual counterpart, the lines that connected the sacred
geography of the Andes, opened up a sense of poetry in space that persists
today in the indigenous fiestas held across the span of the Cordillera de los
Andes. The main art form of the people, these fiestas are an important venue
for oral and performance poetry. A multidimensional expression of mestizaje
imbued with imported aspects of Christianity, the fiesta retains its fundamental
purpose and is performed in reciprocity with the divine, as a pago, or payment
for the gift of life.
in the fiesta, the community becomes the deity, reaching union in a trans­

r
formation achieved through a specific sound: the dissonance between flutes o
other instruments. "I understand all of it on two flutes," says Cesar Vallejo. Wc
include an oral fiesta poem performed in the Baile de Chinos of central Chile
in which many orchestras of musicians and dancers make a pilgrimage to a
sacred site with the intent of healing the earth and the community. Several
flutes are played simultaneously, seeking dissonance and the timbric creation
of "ghost melodies."'^ The audience, comprised of community members, moves
with the group participating in the cosmic exchange. Originally, the fiesta was
for Pachamama, mother of spacetime. Today, the sonic aesthetics of the fiesta
remain strictly pre-Columbian, even though it is devoted to Christian holy fig­
ures. The poem sung is a mestizo reoralization of the Bible, composed in deci-
mas (tenths) that call on the deities to assist them in times of trouble, such as
disease or drought.
Th^khipu, a5 the quintessential poetry in space, reemerged in contemporary
art and poetry, in work created by Jorge Eduardo Eielson, myself, and Edgardo
Vigo.’® The khipu, like Tibetan sand paintings, -cxiibrac^ its own dissolutioji<
I the possibility of being reknotted, rewritten many times" over, t his vision of
I impermanence is what attracted artists to its aesthetics.
Other forms of poetry in space appeared in the cities not in direct relation
to indigenous cultures but in dialogue with the European avant-garde. In the
1940s, the MADI movement conceived of visual poetry on a far larger scale,
imagining a new cityscape for Buenos Aires in which words are as large as
buildings. They distributed leaflets and wrote dictionaries, creating new con­
cepts and definitions of space. Concrete poets in the 1950s opened the way lor
a more organic participation of poetry in society. Their works influenced the
neo-Concrete artists of the sixties who expanded the concept of viable space
creating sculptural poems and installations. The boundaries between art and
poetry blurred, and this greatly expanded poetic space. Artists began to subvert,

xxvl An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics

 expand, and chaotically mix categories. "Catatau" by Paulo Leminski captures
that impulse as he imagines the French philosopher Rene Descartes driven mad
by Brazil, a country where everything gets mixed and defies categorization.
At the juncture of the 1950s and 1960s, many Latin American artists moved
toward performance and began to produce works that interact specifically with
place in a way that echoes the indigenous practices. This happened in syn­
chrony with, but independently from, Europe and the United States. The Dada­
ist concept of poetic action found new expressions in different cities such as
Caracas, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires. Here, in addition to the works already
mentioned, we include the amereida, a collective of architect-poets that set out
on a poetic journey traversing South America while creating poetry and instal­
lations in nature. We also include Raul Zurita's poems written in the sky above
New York City and on the desert of Atacama.

The New Context

Marshall McLuhan prophesized that the global electronic age would bring
about a rebirth of oral culture. He wrote that orality breeds complexity while
literacy breeds homogeneity. The nonlinear understanding of space-time char­
acteristic of oral cultures is making a comeback in the new context created by 1
the Internet and globalization. Latin America, with its immense diversity of lan­
guages and cultures, offers a prolific reservoir for the future. The richness of
its poetry stems from the interaction between oral culture and literacy, which
creates fertile ground for experimentation. The new historical developments
point to a much wider participation by women and indigenous poets writing
in their own languages. A wide range of migrant or nomadic voices add to its
complexity. Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of
poetry abounds "in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations"
of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed.” His vision
resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants creating the sounds and
intonations of the future.

The Place of Women

Some of the greatest Latin American poets have been women. Sor Juana Ines de
la Cruz, Gabriela Mistral, Maria Sabina, and Violeta Parra are among them, but
their true place in the history of poetry has yet to be fully acknowledged. The
anthology begins with an image of a pre-Columbian Mayan woman scribe. This
choice is meant to illuminate the long silencing of women. Just as Malintzin's
linguistic contribution was ignored, our culture still demeans the creativity of
women. The tradition of the female scribe was destroyed by the church that
also forbade the education of women in the early days of the colony. Simultane­
ously, the destruction of pre-Columbian libraries left little evidence of women's
knowledge. But images like the woman scribe and a persistent legacy of poems
suggest that a powerful female poetic tradition existed before the conquest.
•Today, many indigenous communities still ascribe an important place to female

Cecilia Vicurta xxvii

 wisdom and verbal arts. Examples include the Mapuche where most machi (sha­
mans) are women, and the Tzotzil Maya female poets.
Sor Juana, who was the principal poet of the Americas in the seventeenth
century, fought for the right of women to write and paid with her life. In the
nineteenth century, Rosa Araneda from Chile stands out as the only woman
poet of the poesi'a popular movement. Her writing challenged the passive role
assigned to women at the time. At the turn of the century, a legendary group
of women poets emerged, including Delmira Agustini, Alfonsina Storni, and
Gabriela Mistral. Their work caused scandal and outrage but ultimately opened
the way for other women to explore their experience in a woman's voice. Agus­
tini and Storni were immigrant daughters. Mistral was the paradoxical mestiza,
who embodied contradiction. A childless woman who exalted maternity, she
simultaneously embraced and scorned her indianidad. Her extraordinary mix of
biblical and Amerindian rhythms got her the Nobel Prize in 1945. During the
early and mid-twentieth century other important voices joined them including
Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva and Blanca Varela. By the end of the century, poetry’
by Latin American women exploded both in quantity and in creative energy,
but their work still lacks proper recognition. The magnitude of this new writing
will likely require many more studies to do them justice. The last section of the
anthology reflects this changing environment and our desire that a joyful male/
female, sky/earth relationship, as envisioned by Xul Solar in the work we chose
for our cover, may soon take hold.

Migrations
Latin American poets have been on the move since the eighteenth century, often
exiled by oppression or simply traveling to participate in international move­
ments. In the early twentieth century, poets and artists such as Vicente Huidobro,
Cesar Moro, and Joaquin Torres Garcia settled in Paris, the center of world culture
at the time, and chose to write in French to better reach their audience. In recent
decades, a large number of poets moved to the United States and some are experi­
menting with English in yet another iteration of the mestizo spirit. Their journey
parallels the massive migration of workers from Latin America. In "The Exodus of
the Gods" by Sergio Mondragon, the mestizo migrants are the gods. Shamed for
their indigenous origin in their own land, they leave Mexico seeking not just bet­
ter economic opportunities but to reclaim their human dignity.
The migrants' plight has transformed border crossings into a key image in
contemporary Latin American art and poetry. Jose Marti, who lived in exile in
New York, said that shame of the indigenous mother culture is at the core of
Latin America's dependency, fueling the sell-out of natural resources and the
cycle of poverty.^® Gamaliel Churata concurs. It is no coincidence that the main
theorization on this issue has come from the work of Gloria Anzaldi^, a mestiza
born and raised on the border. She writes: "The U.S. Mexican Jiojdel is an open
wound where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.... We, indias
y mestizas, police the Indian in us, brutalize and condemn her." In her work

xxviil An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics

the negative space that defines women by what they "are not" (nonwhite, non­
male), is transformed into creative space, by a will "to fashion my own gods out /
of my entrails."^’ I
Her work indicates the difficult edge all mestizos navigate, the hidden rage
and complex paradoxes that women poets often acknowledge. Blanca Varela
speaks of "the flower that barks." Olga Orozco says, "1 take my bundle of trans-
parent/possessions with me/this insoluble fear." Maria Mercedes Carranza sees
her own inner violence as a mirror to the violence in Colombia and constructs
haikus named after the places where massacres have occurred. During Pinochet's
dictatorship Elvira Hernandez wrote "The Flag of Chile," a poem where the flag
is alive and suffers the same indignities as Chileans. Circulating as photocopies,
the poem became one of the emblems of the resistance movement.

A Poetics of Resistance
As a result of these continuous clashes, a "poetics of resistance" has emerged in
Latin America. It reflects a subtle, but crucial aspect of the indigenous vision that
sees opposing forces as an interactive whole where conflict generates new reali-
ties. In aesthetic terms, the vision translates into a passion for the in-between
where souncl,~visual poetry, and space meet. This multidimensional integration
of the arts may be the lasting legacy of mestizo poetics.
The poet that fully realizes the creative potential of conflict is Cesar Vallejo.
Poor, illegitimate, and shamed since childhood for his mestizo origin, he wrote
from his experience as Garcilaso had done four hundred years before. But his
orientation was radically different. Vallejo searched for unity, the connect­
edness of all peoples: "Oh exalted unity! Oh that which is one/for all!/Love
against space and time!" and he found it in sound, in the intonation of his
mother's voice. She held to the indigenous music while speaking Spanish. In
"Trilce XXIII" the poet speaks of his mother, then he speaks to her. By the end
we hear her voice as his when he says, "di, mama."
Poe, Mallarme, and Baudelaire had already disrupted poetic diction by incor­
porating silence and the dark side of the soul. Jose Maria Eguren understood it as a
philosophical and formal lesson. But Vallejo added two more elements: the Andean
aesthetics of dissonance, which had been invisible in v\’riting until then, and the
ethical dimension of compassion. This was a monumental achievement. In a single
poetic line, his verbs and nouns fight each other as people do in Andean ritual fes­
tivals, where dissonance operates through a clash perceived as unity (solidarity). In
these festivals, dissonant sounds are experienced as "a single heartbeat."-

In sum, during the course of five hundred years, the concepts of sound, visual
form, and space migrated from the ancient indigenous into mestizo culture. How­
ever, throughout the period this influence remains an unacknowledged substrate
of Latin American literature. Change began to occur at the cusp of the twentieth
century when the aesthetic revolutions in Europe freed Latin American poets to
hear the specific sounds of local speech.

Cecilia Vicufta XX lx
 Sound recovered its primary role in composition, and poetry performance
revived. Tlie historic erasure of indigenous visual writing met a new .beginning
when contemporary poets again began incorporating visual dimensions into writ­
ing. Poetry in space continues in both indigenous communities and urban centers.
Today, despite the onslaught of globalization, mestizo poetry continues to thrive.
Jose Lezama Lima wrote that "a secret pulsation of the invisible moves towards the •
image, and the image desires to know and be known.The reciprocal exchange
within the image is thus transformed into a new understanding of life force.
A few decades before, Vallejo wrote that artists engender revolutions by cre­
ating "a cosmic hunger for human justice." The poet's work is to give shape to
"the new chords that will produce those tones.''^-* Placing poetry in the vibra­
tory field where perception participates in the co-creation of the world, Vallejo
reclaims poetry's full potential, echoing the early vision of Huidobro;
"Poetry is the life of life."

[Earlier version translated by Michelle Gil-Montero]

NOTES

In this essay, I expand on ideas first formulated in my lecture "Mestizo Poetics," delivered
at the Next Society Symposium, St. Mark's Poetry Project, New York, 1990.
1. Malintzin—also known as Mallinalli, Malinche, or Doha Marina—was born in the
Veracruz region of southern Mexico (1500-1527?). Her encounter with Hernan Cortes
may have taken place in or around 1519. A Nahua speaker, who also spoke Maya, she
quickly became his translator and concubine, but Hernan Cortes does not refer to her by
name in his letter to the king of Spain. He calls her "la lengua ... que es una India desta
C tierra" ("the tongue, who is an Indian woman of this land").
For a further discussion of the complexities involved in the use of mestizo, see
Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age
of Dex'elopment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). Today the indigenes refer to
i themselves as pueblos originarios in Spanish and First Nations in English. The recent devel-
\ opment of indigenous ethnic movements in Latin America affirms the right to particular
\ ethnicities and a general refusal to be confused with mestizos. See David M. Guss, The
\ Festive State: Race, Ethnicit)', and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley: University
\ of California Press, 2000). And there are other issues. One clear example is the current
\struggle in Mexico, where the Zapatistas see themselves as struggling for justice for all
Mexicans, while the government and its indigenous supporters attempt to portray their
Struggle only as an indigenous interethnic warfare.
\ 3. Cholo is an unattested noun, possibly an Aymara word meaning "dog of mixed race"
or "mutt." A pejorative term, commonly used throughout Latin America to designate an
Indian, or a mestizo. Acholarse means "to be ashamed."
4. "Modem (European) civilization understands itself as the most developed, the supe­
rior civilization; this sense of superiority obliges it, in the form of a categorical imperative,
as it were, to "develop" (civilize, uplift, educate) the more primitive, barbarous, underde­
veloped civilizations" (Enrique Dussel, "Eurocentrism and Modernity," boundary 2, 20:3
[1993]).
(Stennis Tedlock, The Human Work, the Human Design: 2,000 Years of Mayan Writing
(Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).
^John Bierhorst, ed., Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature (Tucson: Univer­
sity of Arizona Press, 1984), p. 17.

ux An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics

 ^T^Lawrence Sullivan, Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Reli­
gions (New York: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 274-276.
All quotes from the Popoi Vuh, translated by Dennis Tedlock (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996). Elsewhere, Tedlock has written, "It was the gods who began the conversa­
tion with the first vigesimal beings, the same gods whose works and designs they were.
The opening words of the makers and modelers. Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, are written
this way" (Dennis Tedlock, Breath on the Mirror: Mythic Voices and Visions of the Living Maya
[Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997], p. 5). And "From the beginning the
gods wanted to make beings who could speak . . . after four tries the gods succeeded at
making real humans, four of them. When they ask these four to talk about themselves,
they get a poem in reply ... a monostitch followed by a distich whose lines are parallel in
both syntax and meaning" (Charles Bernstein, ed., dose Listening: Poetry and the Perfonned
Word [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998], pp. 179-180).
^For a discussion of poetic composition in tonal languages, see Carlos Mon­
temayor, Arte y piegaria en las lenguas indigenas de Mexico (FCE, 1999), and Carlos
Montemayor and Donald Frischmann, eds.. Words of the Tnie Peoples: Anthology of Con­
temporary Mexican Indigenous-Language Writers (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004-
2007). For a brief introduction to the physics of sound, see Utah State University's
Department of Physics, http://www.physics.usu.edu/classes/4020/soundnotes/sound
.htm (accessed July 8, 2008).
Haroldo de Campos, "Superacion de los lenguajes exclusivos," in America latina en
su literatura, ed. Cesar Fernandez Moreno, 15th ed. (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores/UNESCO,
199^ pp. 280-281.
(11^ Quoted from Kaka Wera Jecupe, Tupi poet from Brazil, in interview by Ademir
Assunfao, in Tse-Tse 9/10 (Autumn 2001), p. 99 (see English translation in Chain 9 [Sum­
mer 2002], p. 36).
The Maya logosyllabic writing system mixes logograms (glyphs that represent a
complete word) and syllabic signs. It has not yet been fully deciphered, but the process
is well advanced. As a system based on substitutions that can be semantic or phonetic, it
can write any sound in the Maya languages. Designed to encourage word play, the system
contains tendencies but not absolute rules. To pun in Maya is sakb'al tzij—word dice—and
the art of writing and reading is oriented to find combinations that create sudden shifts
in meaning. As Dennis Tedlock says, for Mayans, "it is only in the subhuman domain that
wordlike sounds can stay in tidy, isomorphic relationships to their meaning" (Bernstein,
Close Listening, p. 180). See also Miguel Leon-Portilla and Earl Shorris, In the Language of
Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature—Pre-Columbian to the Present (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2002), pp. 5-6, 394-395. For a graphic demonstration, see the PBS NOVA epi­
sode, Cracking the Maya Code and companion Web site, http://\\3v\v.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
mayacode/ (accessed July 8, 2008).
13. Tedlock, Human Work.
^^4^Quoted from Sullivan, Icanchu's Drum, p. 113. For Sullivan "space itself is . .
. a
manifestation of the meaning of existence" (p. 115).
15. Ibid., p. 128.
Khipu is "knot" in Quechua, usually spelled quipu in Spanish. An Andean record­
ing system for keeping statistics, accounts, poems, songs, and stories by knotting col­
ored threads, encoded with meaning according to position, twist, and color. It has never
been fully deciphered. Originally, Europeans saw it only as a mnemonic device, but new
research and digital technology is unveiling its interactive and mathematical complex­
ity. See the Khipu Database Project, http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/. See also Tom
Cummins in Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo's VVnfizj^ Without Words: Alter­
native Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp.
188-219; Gary Urton's Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String

Cecilia Vicufta xxxl

 Records (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), and Marcia Ascher and Robert Aschcc’
Mathematics of the Incas: Code of the Quipu (New York: Dover, 1997).
17. P^rez de Arce, Miisica eii la piedra: Miisica prehispdnico y siis ecos en Chile actual (Ss?-
tiago: Museo Chileno de Arte Precolombino, 1995), pp. 36-37.
18. Ernesto Livon-Grosman has interpreted this work as a khipu. See http://www.bc.ed'-
research/elg/trabaios/documents/neruda_y_vigo_2.pdf .
19. Dante Alighieri, Literature in the Vernacular (Carcanet, 1981), pp. 34-35.
20. Jose Marti, "Nuestra America," in fose Marti (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1977'
p. 27.
21. All quotes from Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books), pp. 25,44.
22. Quoted from "Absolute (The Black Heralds)," in The Complete Poetry of Cesar Valle}:
trans. Clajlon Eshleman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 112.
23. "Despues de la muerte de Bolivar, Simon Rodriguez sigue sumergido en la dimerv
Sion incaica ... sabe que la profundizacion de esa dimension sera el esclarecimiento de
espacio americano... sigue ganando las mas decisivas batalias por la imagen, las secrets;
pulsaciones de lo invisible hacia la imagen, tan ansiosa de conocimiento como de se
conocida." In Jose Lezama Lima's "Imagen de America Latina," in Moreno, America latir-
ensu literatura, 1st ed. (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores/UNESCO, 1972), p. 468.
24. "Los artistas frente a la politica" in Cesar Vallejo, ed., Literatura y arte (Buenos Aire*
1966), pp. 49-53.

***JI An Introduction to Mestizo Poetics

 A Historical Introduction to Latin American Poetry
Ernesto Livon-Grosman

This anthology of five hundred years of Latin American poetry aspires to be

both an authoritative tool of reference and an innovative collection of materi­
als capable of mapping new territories. By including so many poems not previ­
ously translated into English, the anthology creates an encompassing image of
Latin American culture, in both the national and the continental senses. Aware
of this interplay between the local and the continental, we have created an
anthology that does not separate our judgment of the aesthetic value of particu­
lar poems from our assessment of their historical importance. Throughout the
anthology, we have emphasized the perspectives and themes that have contrib­
uted most to the development of Latin American poetry. Instead of presenting
a primarily canonical selection of poets, we elected to be both inclusive and
expansive, presenting a series of connected themes that make available to read­
ers the many dialogues, past and present, that have engendered Latin American
poetics as we know it today.
Indeed, our selection reflects the many debates and exchanges, large and
small, that, over time, have defined Latin American poetry. More specifically,
the poems presented here are both responses to discussions of poetic genre and
responses to questions of race and ethnicity that originated in the seventeenth
century. For it is in the seventeenth century that ideas concerning criollo iden­
tity and criollo culture (in Spanish America a fusion of indigenous and European
influences) began to inform and define what it meant to be Latin American.
As a result, Latin American literary culture is marked by socially conscious dia­
logue. This does not mean that this dialogue is always explicitly political, but
Latin American poetry is, among other things, a product of the struggles for
independence that resulted in different nation-states and, later, in the long-
lasting effort to define itself as a new territory distinct from Europe.
From 1492 onward, with the arrival of the Spanish, and the subsequent con­
quest and colonization, the relationships and conflicts between the settlers and
the indigenous populations resulted in the need to create a distinct cultural
identity, one that reflected new historical and social realities. Many poetic prac­
tices existed prior to 1492, of course, and those were and still are, in many areas
of the continent, a determining factor for local cultures. It is in recognition of
this fact that we have included examples from the oral traditions that survived
the conquest. These poems, which were sometimes preserved in Spanish via
translations and in others languages by oral tradition (such as the works derived
from the Popol Vuh), are now an integral part of a larger, continental tradition.
Other examples include efforts to translate into Spanish languages that were
hitherto unknown in the European world. Such is the case of Inca Garcilaso
de la Vega, who in the sixteenth century wrote about the khipu—the system

xxxlll
of ropes and knots devised by the Inca as a method of historical record keep­
ing—and its importance in Inca culture. The khipu has since become a point
of departure for rethinking the relation between old and new traditions. We
see this quite explicitly in the context of the twentieth-century Latin American
vanguard movements, many of which were interested in the possibility of dis­
covering an original language, and in some cases linking the new and the old as
integral aspects of their experimental practices. Visual poetry provides one such
interesting example, as seen in the "object-poem" of Edgardo Antonio Vigo,
who incorporated the khipu into his work to establish a connection between
the aboriginal oral tradition and his own experimental poetry. The process of
mestizaje, or mixing, is a term that has a long tradition, and as a creative force
it continues to make history an important element for the understanding of
modern Latin American poetry.
In the tumultuous years between 1804 and 1860, when colonial Spanish
America was succeeded by independence (with the exception of Cuba and
Puerto Rico), we see that political struggle mirrored by a literary struggle to for­
mulate a uniquely Latin American poetics. The era of Latin American Romanti­
cism, the influence of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment as cultural
entities were decisive factors for the independence movements. The split with
Europe gave rise to two basic themes: that of independence itself and the cel­
ebration of regional criollo (Creole) literatures.
Criollo language and culture steadily gained prominence. In Argentina,
the work of Jose Hernandez, Hilario Ascasubi, and others, though vastly dif­
ferent from each other, together ushered in a new cultural era and a new
form of poetry emerged, one inspired by the folk traditions of the Argentine
gauchos. With its images of a new territory and a new language, the gaitch-
esqite soon came to be regarded as Argentina's national poetry and influ­
enced ongoing debates about whether to identify the new nation with the
urban or the rural, the cosmopolitan or the indigenous. This became all the
more evident in the context of the debates involving cosmopolitan and
indigenous cultures, the former being associated with the metropolis and
the other with the life of the land. The question of the urban versus the rural
went to the heart of discussions about the identity of these new nations, as
did the new local languages that gaucho poetry helped to mold. The gaiiche-
sqite paved the way for later poets, among them Leonidas Lamborghini, to
use the vernacular as a way of recovering the rural culture while, at the same
time, using parody to transcend nationalism.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Jose Marti entered the liter-
ary and political arena. One of the most politically committed and visionary
poets of his day, he is one of Latin America's most esteemed intellectuals and
the author of "Nuestra America," an essay that deals with the dominance of
the United States in the region and the importance of creating a strong sense
of community among the different nations of Latin America. A foundational

A Historical Introduction to latin American Poetry

writer for later postcolonial critics, Marti would become for many a way of
bridging Romanticism and tnodemistno.
Between 1880 and 1920, Latin America began to assume its modern appear­
ance: nation-states and internal regions were established and defined, borders
were drawn, and the central states came into being. In this era of moderniza­
tion, France emerged an important point of reference while Spain and Portu­
gal ceased to have the homogenizing influence they had during colonial times.
Once again, a new poetic movement took hold, led by Ruben Dario. Modem-
ismo, best described as Spanish America's interpretation of Symbolism, effec­
tively infused its poetics with a strong sense of continental identity. Largely for
that reason, it was a pan-American cultural movement, one of the first, with
Dario's influence extending far and wide. He became intimately associated with
Argentine cultural circles, and, although Nicaraguan, worked for the Argentine
embassy as a representative to Europe. Such a thing would not have been pos­
sible were it not for the prestige that poetry had in the public sphere, and due
to the fluidity of the concept of national identity in Latin America—a situation
that allowed for greater communication between different cultural regions.
The early twentieth century belongs to the Latin American vanguard move­
ments, many of which rejected tnodernistrio for being a mere imitation of Euro­
pean culture. But Europe, in particular French surrealism and Anglo-American
modernism, were important points of reference for the Latin American van­
guards. With astonishing speed, Latin American avant-garde poets set about
appropriating and redefining these foreign models, fulfilling in many respects a
process started by modemismo. The Brazilians Mario de Andrade and Oswald de
Andrade are excellent examples of this transformational process, which exalted
the vernacular and culture of the region while, at the same time, cultivating
the cosmopolitan perspective that was so important to tnodenjismo. Oswald de
Andrade coined the term "antropofagia cultural" to describe a poetics in which
Latin America cannibalizes and metabolizes European culture. The result, he
argued, was a wholly new Latin American cultural body. In another area of
vanguard poetry, Oliverio Girondo's En la masinedida provided an important
example of the ways in which content could be seen as an extension of form,
reversing the notion of experimental poetry as a purely formal practice.
This tradition of rupture, to use a phrase coined by Mexican poet Octavio Paz
to characterize the experimental tradition, received added impetus in 1959, the
year the Cuban Revolution succeeded. It is in 1959 that artists and intellectuals
renewed their commitment to the pan-American cultural project. Ernesto Carde-
nal, Coronel Urtecho, Roque Dalton, and Juan Gelman, among others, looked
to the vernacular as they searched for a poetics that could be written and read
by everyone and cultivated a discursive transparency that echoed the urgency
of the political situation at that time. With the advent of this committed poet­
ics and the rising of figures such as Roque Dalton and Ernesto Cardenal, poetry
achieved a new level of popularity creating a distinct separation: a "before" and

Ernesto Livon-Grosnian XXXV

 "after" the Cuban Revolution. The denunciation of authoritarian regimes as
well as the causes and effects of social inequality became dominant themes of
the post-Cuban Revolution era and constitute some of the forces that redefined
notions of high and low culture.
Other poetic expressions also emerged during this era, certainly one of
the most productive and influential cultural moments in the history of Latin
America. Beginning in the 1950s, the Brazilian "Noigandres" group redefined
Concrete poetry, a movement that united writers and visual artists by using
new graphic designs that had previously been seen only in the context of adver­
tisement. Other writers, Violeta Parra among them, focused on the recovery of
Latin American folklore, while poets such as Nicanor Parra reinvented Dadaism
through a poetics of the absurd. An era of great eclecticism, it is impossible to
encapsulate with a single work or image. All of these practices, however, were
affected by political events and by the increasing influence of mass media as
well as new technology. Poets began to incorporate multimedia techniques
into their w’orks and to demonstrate a greater interest in performance and the
subversion of the public stage through spectacle, such as the "happenings"
organized by the Instituto Di Telia in Buenos Aires during the 1960s. In some
instances, revolutionary poetics evolved into more academic models, as was the
case with the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, who strove to create
a visual poetics that would reaffirm the autonomy of art and poetry. However
different these poetic movements, they were all fueled by the same spirit of
renovation and an interest for accessibility and widening distribution of poetr>’
to the public.
The political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s were followed by
two decades of authoritarianism throughout much of Latin America. Military
regimes sought to put an end to left-wing insurgency and the progressive nation­
alization of the economy that came about due to the ever-expanding economic
and cultural dominance of the United States. During this period of acute politi­
cal repression, civil rights were suspended and the media and other areas of cul­
ture censored. But unlike essays and fiction, which were heavily censored under
the dictatorships, poets managed to continue publishing and circulating their
works. This was due in part to the fact that poetry was disseminated primarily
through a small press distribution system that made room for underground and
less visible ways of reaching its readers. The Argentine journal XUL, for example,
published poets as diverse, divergent, and subversive as the Neo-Baroque Nestor
Perlongher, the visual experimentalist Jorge Lepore, the sound and performance
poetics of the Paralengua group, the Dadaist revivalist poetics of Emeterrio Cerro,
and the editor himself of the journal, Jorge Santiago Perednik.
With the slow restoration of democracy in the 1980s, a new type of poetry
emerged, one informed by progress in women's rights and the gay liberation
movement. Cultural activists avoided oppositional politics and adopted a more
flexible critical stance. Emphasis on identity politics, which largely replaced the
universalism of the populist poetics of previous decades, resulted in a fascination

xxxvl A Historical Introduction to Latin American Poetry

with autobiographical voices and a sophisticated elaboration of the first per­
son. The Mexicans Gerardo Deniz and Coral Bracho and the Cuban Reina Marfa
Rodrfguez are examples of this fusion between the private and the public, the
experimental and the lyrical. The degree of richness and the multiplicity of
voices make this era one of the most vital and interesting since the restoration
of democracy in the 1980s.
We consider this anthology, therefore, to be a work that documents the col­
lective interest in language that has shaped the course of Latin American poetry
for the past five hundred years. Although we are dealing with a vast amount of
material, we have found it possible to identify common aesthetic practices. In
making our selection, we found that Latin American poetry as a whole can be
viewed as a system of themes and strategic symmetries. Symmetry, in this case,
is defined in terms of combinations and patterns that have remained constant
despite shifting historical events.
One of the constants of Latin American poetry is the effort to establish and
develop a vernacular language, one that is clearly rooted in the local and aware
of the newness of America. Hence the constant efforts to adapt non-American
models (European, African, Asian) to what Jose Lezama Lima calls the American
experience. Examples of this are found in the villancicos of seventeenth-century
Mexican poet Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz that incorporate verses in Nahuatl. We
also see this process at work in the poetry of contemporary Chilean poet Elikura
Chihuailaf, who writes in Mapungdun. There is also the work of cultural trans­
lation undertaken by niodeniistno in general, and in works by Ruben Dario in
particular. The Argentine poet Olga Orozco would later exhibit a similar interest
in the linguistic and aesthetic re-elaboration of French surrealism. And again we
see this mixing of languages and cultures in popular idioms that characterize
the poetry of the Cordel, a type of poetry in which poets string poems together
and hang them between two posts in popular markets and streets. Xul Solar's
neo-Creole, an essentially pan-American language, offers yet another example.
For more than five hundred years, Latin American poets have consistently used
this interest in the vernacular to elaborate their aesthetic practices, and they
have done so while being interested in other languages. This is a process that is
not so easily separated from the hundreds of years of translation practices that
are an integral part of many cultural encounters. In fact, cultural and linguistic
translation are the primary components of Latin American culture beginning
with the first European contact and continuing until the present, when it is
possible to walk into so many Latin American bookstores and find oneself sur­
rounded by Spanish and Portuguese translations from so many languages.
In recognition of this tradition of translation, we sought throughout the
anthology to emphasize the importance of mestizaje in Latin American poetry.
Mestizaje is a cultural process that grew out of the conflicts of the Conquest
and, initially, as in the work of the Inca Garcilaso, was an attempt to negotiate
ethnic differences. Much later, at the end of the nineteenth century, it becomes
possible to speak of mestizaje in terms of class differences and in a nationalistic

Ernesto Livon-Grosinan xxxvll

 sense. Given the impact that the arrival of immigrants had on Latin Ameri­
cans' sense of their own identities, traditional definitions of what it meant to be
crioHo began to exceed regional definitions. The pan-Americanism of the 1960s
and 1970s offers a good example of this multiethnic, trans-American tendency’.
One manifestation of this fusion of languages and cultures is the neo­
baroque, which was a practice that grew out of an appropriation of the Spanish
baroque to become an authentically Latin American aesthetic. This came about,
in great part, because Jose Lezama Lima, among others, developed even further
the concept of an American neo-baroque, one that would fuse European and
criollo cultural referents and take the original Spanish form to a new level of
complexity and diversity. Other well-known practitioners include the Cubans
Severn Sarduy and Jose Kozer, the Argentine Nestor Perlongher, and the Brazil­
ian Josely Vianna Baptista—all poets who combined the concept of mestizaje
with experimental poetics.
America in the continental sense is thus not only a product of the direct
exchanges and conflicts among the parts of the whole but also an ongoing dia­
logue of what defines, in a complete sense, that which we call the Americas.
This dialogue, carried out in Latin American poetics, makes possible an inter­
pretation that connects common interests that are, in general, defined in con­
trast to Europe and that, at times, surpass what is strictly Latin American. In
a broad sense, we can speak of this process as a work of translation, diffusion,
and inclusion of many influences, national and otherwise. Cultural, as well as
strictly linguistic, translation is a logical extension of this work of fusion that
defines the last five hundred years of Latin American poetry.
Translation here should be understood as a form of writing and interpreta­
tion. The Canadian poets Steve McCaffery and bpNichol have written on the
importance of keeping in mind the translator as "a conscious generative force.*
As they point out, we see how every poetic turn we face involves the historical
time of the poet and also the very work in progress that is implicit in the trans­
lation of every poem—a multilayer system of references that point to the "origi­
nal" poem and its circumstances, as much as to the translator's work.
We see Latin American poetry as an evolution that is unique in its complexity*
and its commitment to remain open to experimental practices and the weaving
of old and new traditions. The richness and expansiveness of Latin American
cultures, past and cunent, their extraordinary range of voices and registers is all
present in its poetry.

[Translated by Kathryn Kopple]

xxzvfl A Historical Introduction to Latin American Poetry

 The Oxford Book
of Latin American Poetry