I have always wanted to have this conversation with Francisco Véjar. I suspected that Teillier’s work was more complex than it appeared, and this exchange shows that theory to be true.

Francisco Véjar met Teillier in 1988. The circumstances surrounding this meeting have since become part of Chilean poetry lore. The meeting took place in the kitchen of the headquarters of the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile, thanks to the intervention of the establishment’s butler, Don Fernando, the mastermind behind this encounter. That afternoon, Véjar gave Teillier a copy of his first book, Fluvial (1988). A short while later, Teillier wrote a piece about Fluvial that was published by the renowned journalist Carlos Olivares. This was the beginning of a great friendship.

Véjar stayed in Molino de Ingenio as Teillier’s guest on several occasions, where he would spend his time reading and writing while Teillier was out of the house. It was a time of long conversations, reading, and editorial work. One afternoon, in 1990, Teillier read Véjar a collection of unpublished poems. He asked Véjar to help him arrange these poems, which would later form the book El molino y la higuera, for which Teillier won several major prizes, including the Premio Eduardo Aguita in 1993.

Francisco Véjar was more than Teillier’s friend; he was a privileged witness to the life, translation and creative work of one of the greatest Chilean poets of the twentieth century. This conversation begins with a recognition of this friendship, as personal as it was literary. I should add here a perhaps little-known fact: Véjar caused one of Teillier’s dreams to be fulfilled by publishing a collection of his poems with Spanish publishing house Visor. That anthology, Poemas de la realidad secreta, was released in 2019.

Marcelo Rioseco: I would like to begin this interview by revisiting Jorge Teillier’s work. My impression is that, almost three decades after his death, his poetry is still alive and read: one proof of this is the number of anthologies published in both Chile and Spain in recent years. How do you see the legacy of Teillier’s poetry?

Francisco Véjar: Almost three decades after his death, Jorge Teillier is more relevant every day. This is proven by the innumerable anthologies of his poetic work, published in Spain as much as in Latin America. Other poets of his generation have not had the same luck. Why, you ask yourselves? The answer is simple: Teillier is a poet more in line with current trends. In Spain, the youth are reading him. Visor published Poemas de la realidad secreta in 2019 and Cátedra included him in its catalogue with Nostalgia de la tierra, edited by Chilean poet and editor Juan Carlos Villavicencio, in 2013. The truth is that it’s not easy to speak properly about Teillier’s poetry, because so many different voices and traditions are merged within it. For example, his work contains elements of lyrical poetry from France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Romania, and England, to name but a few.

M.R.: On that theme, Teillier was a poet of great intertextuality and an experienced translator, but my impression is that this aspect of his work has not been studied in the way it deserves…

F.V.: That’s true. In fact, the titular poem from Nostalgia de la tierra, the collection compiled by Juan Carlos Villavicencio, wasn’t written by Teillier: the author is Jules Supervielle, and the poem is called “Le regret de la terre.” What Jorge Teillier has produced is a literal and very well executed translation with respect to the original text. But if we go back to Poemas del país de nunca jamás, published in 1963, we find there the poem “El día del fin del mundo,” which is an adaptation of “A Song on the End of the World” by Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. Scholars of Jorge Teillier’s work have not dwelt on these aspects, and have continued to repeat ad infinitum certain stock phrases like “lárico” [of the Lares—a term often used to describe Teillier’s poetry] and make reference to Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl, and Serguei Esenin, but they have not delved deeper into the polyphony of voices that lie at the heart of his poetic work.

For example, the title of Para ángeles y gorriones (1956), his first book of poems, alludes to some verses by the German poet Heinrich Heine, which say: “To the angels and the sparrows / we leave Heaven and its Gods” [English translation: Joseph Massaad]. So Teillier’s work should be seen as a journey through the most unique aspects of Chilean and international poetry. This diffusion can be seen in his work with intertextuality. Perhaps there it forms part of his legacy, on top of his mastery as a poet.

M.R.: Can you give another example? Perhaps we could look together at a couple of poems with the originals on the table, to get a better idea of how Teillier worked the translations.

F.V.: Another example is the poem “No fue el helado viento,” which was published in En el mudo corazón del bosque (1997), but without making any allusion to the fact that it was a liberal interpretation of the W.B. Yeats poem “The Withering of the Bough,” from the book Yeats titled In the Seven Woods, published in 1904. It’s impressive the way Teillier keeps on finding soulmates in both Chilean and international poetry. One example of this is the text we just quoted. We can also take another poem, titled “Hay un espejo colgado de una pared rota,” which is by the American poet Kenneth Rexroth. In this case, Teillier’s translation is literal, and it’s as if it were written by his own hand. It is worth noting that there are many theses written about Teillier’s work that allude to these texts as if they were written by him. And that’s not the case. Hopefully this interview will help scholars of his work put their essays in better order. We need an equivalent in Chile of Spain’s Túa Blesa, who studies the work of Leopoldo María Panero without missing a single detail of Panero’s life and work.

M.R.: You mention that Teillier kept finding “soulmates” in Chilean and international poetry. Can you give me an example of a Chilean or Hispano-American poet who awoke this interest in Teillier?

F.V.: Of course. Jorge Teillier read Chilean poetry deeply. And he admired Victoriano Vicario. He paid tribute to him in the poem “Viaje en globo”, published in Para un pueblo fantasma (1978). That poem begins in the following way: “El sur ha muerto. Hay que encender linternas” [The south has died. Time to light lanterns]. And this is Victoriano Vicario, a poet of the generation of ’38, very little read. His poem “Soledad y humo” begins saying: “El sol ha muerto. Hay que encender linternas” [The sun has died. Time to light lanterns]. So what Teillier is doing here is incorporating those verses into the poem, in a masterful manner, using the technique of collage, or intertextuality, as it should be called. In other verses of the same poem, Teiller writes: “Hay que partir pronto. / Está por llegar el fin del mundo. / Cerraron el Black and White. / Nadie toca el piano bajo luna. / Nadie hace la cimarra para jugar billar. / Volemos sobre el Nido de Cucúes del siglo XX. / No vale la pena quedarse a mirar incendios. / Fahrenheit 451 está de moda” [It’s almost time to go. / The end of the world is coming soon. / They closed the Black and White. / No one plays the piano in the moonlight. / No one plays hooky to shoot pool. / Let’s fly over the twentieth-century Cuckoo’s Nest. / It’s not worth waiting around to watch fires. / Fahrenheit 451 is in style]. As we can see, there are several literary references here. And when the poem is coming to an end, he writes: “Vámonos pronto. / No importa que al fondo de lo desconocido / No haya nada nuevo” [Let’s get out of here soon. / It doesn’t matter that in the depths of the unknown / There’s nothing new]. Here he quotes Baudelaire, who says you have to “plunge to the depths of the unknown to find something new” [English translation: William Aggeler]. What is interesting is that the quotes come to be a substantial part of the poem. As we said earlier, Teillier invites us with his poems into his inner world, populated by voices that we are now elucidating. And if we want to talk about soulmates, he had one in particular, and he has a name: René-Guy Cadou (1920-1951). Teillier is drenched in his poetry. Not for nothing did he call him “El poeta de este mundo” [The poet of this world] in one of his most iconic books, Muertes y Maravillas (1971).

M.R.: How do you view this translation and rewriting work of Teillier’s? I’d like it if you could talk a little about the boundaries between Teillier’s translation and what some might call appropriation, even plagiarism. Is there a poetics behind these exercises?

F.V.: Of course! There is a poetic proposition and a worldview that starts with Para ángeles y gorriones (1956) and culminates in En el mudo corazón del bosque (1997). That worldview feeds on various traditions, including those from Chile. Now, Teillier was a voracious reader from childhood, with a great capacity for retention. He read several authors in Spanish and French. And, in a very natural way, he incorporated the collage technique into a large part of his poetic work. I’ve already mentioned that in El país de nunca jamás (1963), Teillier publishes “El día del fin de mundo,” which turns out to be an adaptation of Milosz’s work. In this same book, there is a poem called “En la secreta casa de la noche,”  and the first two verses come from a phrase that appears in the novel The Subterraneans, by Jack Kerouac. But what concerns us now is the line between rewriting and plagiarism. Here, there isn’t one. It’s a creative adventure that the poet invites us to join. An example of this voyage is the poem “Blue,” published in Para un pueblo fantasma (1978). There, he fosters a communicating vessel with “The Cats Will Know,” a poem by Cesare Pavese that forms part of his book, Vendrá la muerte y tendrá sus ojos (1950). Preferentially, in the translation by María de la Luz Uribe, sister of Chilean poet Armando Uribe. She published an essay, titled Cesare Pavese (1966), in the collection El Espejo de Papel, under the Editorial Universitaria imprint. In this essay appears the poem I alluded to, translated by María de la Luz. Teillier read that book. Now, it’s important to be clear that his work is genuine and his own, and with a personal stamp—we can read a large part of his life story in his volumes of poetry. Read “Paisaje de Clínica” or “Pequeña confesión,” both of which were included in Para el pueblo fantasma (1978). What also needs to be borne in mind is that Jorge Teillier died while he was compiling said books. So texts by other authors have been confused as his, for the simple reason that they were written in his hand. They were translations that he used to do continually, of French and English poets, but that had links to his own poetic imagining. Many of his translations improve on the source text. His adaptation of a poem by the Welsh poet Henry Treece surpassed the original. Here, there is a gamble, a poetics, and a way of being and of living in the world.

M.R.: Are there any other examples of these cases of translation and intertextuality in Jorge Teillier’s work that you would like to comment on?

F.V.: Yes, there’s a text by the American poet, Kenneth Rexroth, titled “The Mirror in the Woods,” which Teillier translated as “Hay un espejo colgado en una pared rota,” and the poem begins: “Hay un espejo colgado en una pared rota / En una vieja casa de campo / Perdida en un bosque sombrío. / Nada se mueve jamás en él / Salvo sombras submarinas de sombríos / helechos y pinos. / El marco está cubierto de musgo. / Un día el espejo se deslizó al piso. / Años y años permaneció en los tablones astillados” [A mirror hung on the broken / Walls of an old summer house / Deep in the dark woods. Nothing / Ever moved in but the undersea shadows of ferns, / Rhododendrons and redwoods. / Moss covered the frame. One day / The gold and glue gave way and / The mirror slipped to the floor. / For many more years it stood / On the shattered boards]. What the author of Para ángeles y gorriones (1956) is doing here is translating himself. For this reason, he finds in Rexroth part of his world. And what’s curious is that, in the verses quoted here, there is something of the swampy south that Teillier experienced in his childhood, something that Rexroth surely never imagined. So it isn’t a vain search, but is charged with meaning, because it becomes part of his poetic proposition. And the poem continues, saying: “Muy rara vez / Una rata del bosque / pasó junto a él sin siquiera echarle una mirada. / Un día llegué yo. / Rompí la puerta desvencijada / Y pasó conmigo una angosta cuña de sol / Llevé el espejo al cuarto de mi abuelo muerto / Y lo dejé reflejar su retrato / Mientras en la vieja casa del bosque / Las sombras / Las ratas del bosque y el musgo / Tuvieron que trabajar sin su testigo” [Once in / A long time a wood rat would / Pass it without ever / Looking in. At last we came, / Breaking the sagging door and / Letting in a narrow wedge / Of sunlight. We took the mirror / Away and hung it in my / Daughter’s room with a barre before / It. Now it reflects ronds, escartes, / Releves and arabesques. / In the old house the shadows, / The wood rats and moss work unseen]. Without doubt, it’s a good translation, and it was included in Hotel Nube (1996). The title of this book alludes to the Truman Capote novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). In that narrative, there is a vagrant who sets up home in a forest and puts up a sign outside his den that says “Hotel Nube.” Nothing happens by chance in this textual machinery. There is a personal stamp here that makes it impossible to confuse him with other contemporaneous poets.

M.R.: Thank you, Francisco, for these interesting and illuminating explanations of Jorge Teillier’s translation work…

F.V.: Not at all, thank you to Latin American Literature Today for taking an interest in this aspect of Teillier’s work. I hope that what we have discussed will help some of those researchers of his work, who have included some of these poems in anthologies without clarifying that they are translations carried out by Teillier. This, of course, does not detract from his work; on the contrary, it makes it more vital and topical.

Translated by Ruth Donnelly

Photo: Chilean writer Francisco Véjar.

Francisco Véjar nació en Viña del Mar, en 1967. Es  poeta, crítico, antólogo y ensayista chileno. Incluido en diversas antologías, tanto en Chile como en el extranjero, sus poemas han sido traducidos al inglés, italiano, portugués, croata, y catalán. El 2006 la revista Poesía, dirigida por Nicola Crocetti en Milán, Italia, abordó su trabajo poético, desde Fluvial (1988) en adelante. La exégesis y traducción fueron hechas por Cristina Sparagana. Es así como ha publicado los siguientes libros de poemas: Música para un álbum personal (1992), Canciones (1998), País insomnio (2000), El emboscado (2003), Cicatrices y estrellas (2017) y Manuscrito encontrado en mi bolsillo (2021). En 2008, publica La fiesta y la ceniza (Editorial Universitaria, Colección: El Poliedro y el Mar). En tanto, el 2009 da a conocer su libro de crónicas Los Inesperados, donde da cuenta de la vida y obra de Nicanor Parra, Jorge Teillier, Enrique Lafourcade, Raúl Ruiz, Efraín Barquero, Pedro Lastra y Claudio Giaconi. En 2015, es seleccionado en la antología Giovane poesia latinoamericana, traducida por el poeta italiano, Gianni Darconza (Raffaelli Editore, Roma, Italia). Y en 2019, publica la antología Poemas de la realidad secreta, en la Editorial Visor, con selección y prólogo de su autoría. En la actualidad, es crítico de poesía del suplemento cultural “Artes y Letras” del diario El Mercurio en Chile.