Gastón Fernández’s hermetic collection of 100 psalm-like poems marks the English-language debut of this legendary Peruvian writer of the late twentieth century. Fernández lived most of his adult life in Belgium, working as an art historian. While publishing his scholarship mostly in French, he produced literary works semi-secretly in his native Spanish. Shared only with close friends, very few of these works were published in his lifetime. Apparent Breviary is his lone collection of poems, notable as much for their silences as what they say, their use of negative space as a counterweight to speech, and the hallucinatory effect of their sequence.

10

Yesterday I supposed
                                   once again you would
turn

your head so we could talk —

(the hand loses feeling
left for too long
on the breast

and desire is a short time

In the center               chance
remains,
noises by chance
remade.            Turn around
death
                         stands there
does not tremble,
does not move)

11

I’m not the
mute one

reality spills, her,
on reversed eyes
on the lip’s back

The wind.

The book.               Spilling eyes.
Lord,
why if not               the nonetheless
if hope spills over buildings if
hands grasp
contain

air

footnote asking if
clarity     is

really

12

The bird          is

fire,

veins

eyes, hollow heading
upward

being:             life precipitates an inert flow
in weight        and soul is air

                                                          a book
                                                          a trace
                                                          I am not

                                                          speech

13

Right over there

I’d rather go forehead first

The temple mount               is short
The hair’s peak is short

and if I speak
I lose.

And if I talk
about the bodies—

That darkness
that house
the way the birds gaze!

14

Rage is a noun

Either know a poet in a book           Or put
one’s conscience on
a cloud.           Place a
patriarch                   on one’s lips,
wipe a revolution from my
lips

(To murder man, to organize
the body with the goal of understanding
                                                                      the cold

the weapon

death to the phoneme so there will be no
death               and
murder man
no reason
no prose
no poem

15

Let there be derision

Let it be read

Pass from magazine to face,
from page to precise      universal
vengeance, because derision
centers in the mouth
between pores of
letters               travels on
fingers

promoting             proposing to figure myself
among the stones

incorporate myself to begin again
birds              sex

time

Translated by KM Cascia

Forthcoming from World Poetry Books, 2025.