In February 2025, Miami-based press Alliteration Publishing released Domestic Life, a bilingual edition of La vida doméstica by Marcelo Rioseco, winner of the 2016 Premio Academia from the Academia Chilena de la Lengua, translated into English by Arthur Malcolm Dixon.
We are happy to share five poems from the collection with LALT’s readers, along with an excerpt from the translator’s note by Arthur Malcolm Dixon.
On Translating Domestic Life
(an excerpt from the translator’s note)
Domestic Life is saturated with a theme I find eminently relatable, as I think many readers will agree: the imposter syndrome that plagues all of us who dedicate ourselves to creative endeavors. Here, Marcelo’s stand-in (Mauricio) is literally haunted by the ghost of Roberto Bolaño, who pops in every so often from the romantic deserts of poetic oblivion to poke fun at him for having fish filets for dinner and remind him of the wild, bohemian essence of pure literary impulse he is allowing to shrivel and wane as he lives the comfortable, (it must be said) domestic life of a poet-cum-professor at a U.S. university. After seven poetry books (and this one’s being recognized as the best of its pub year), Marcelo still cannot help but wonder: Do I write poems, or am I a poet? Does the former necessarily mean the latter? I can’t pretend to offer any answers here; I have translated a great deal over the past ten years, but I still find myself doubting whether or not I am a translator in much the same way. To use an appropriately homey idiom, I guess the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I invite anyone who has read this far to turn to the poems and decide for themselves.
Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Domestic Life
Domestic life
is the fastest way to kill a poet’s madness
and the fastest way to kill the poet.
I read Claudia my poem about Roberto Bolaño.
Claudia looks at me and after a beat
she asks, “Hungry? The salmon filets
are still in the fridge.”
From the deserts of death
where he lives now, Bolaño winks his eye at me and says,
“I didn’t know you liked
salmon filets, Mauricio.”
Claudia has gone out, but she’ll soon be back,
like Christ when he got bored.
Meanwhile I try to understand
what’s the matter with the salmon
and whether or not I should write this poem.
“Stop spilling milk all over the kitchen!” she shouts.
I look for Bolaño, but this time his visage
has evaporated among my books
and the food stuck to the dirty plates.
Maybe we’re all already dead
like the motionless fish dragged downstream.
Poetry Conference
After 10 years living outside Chile,
I thought the poets
would have sorted out their quarrels
but (as always) I was wrong.
When I got to the airport
Neruda was trying to land a punch on Huidobro.
“That son of a bitch!” he shouted.
“He’s always talking shit about me.”
In the hotel lobby I came across De Rokha,
who was blind drunk,
outside someone had tied
a horse painted green to a lamppost.
“I’ll break his face, I swear,” he whispered
into my ear before passing out.
I suppose he knew who he was talking about.
It was a hotel for poets and critics.
During the Conference someone claimed
we must understand
the body as an ideological space
and everywhere rang out
the cawing of the crows of death
devouring the dried-out body of ideological space.
Dr. Weismeister spoke on Bolaño
and everyone laughed and laughed without end.
“I don’t know what you find so funny!” she exclaimed.
“You, darling, you’re so funny.”
It was Bolaño, speaking from the underworld of Comala.
“You’re the funniest thing in the world,” he said.
He was down there with Rulfo
speaking on the young poets of South America
and the dead who walk like drunks
between dark, abandoned churches.
It seems the romantic dogs
have given up their spot to the rabid dogs of Chile.
Then the young poets arrived.
They said they were working on
the poetics of resentment and tenderness
(all at once).
They read poems off their cell phones
and when they weren’t reading
they checked Facebook.
And that was how we distracted ourselves
in god’s last hole.
I was with Huidobro
sitting in the back of the reading room.
I asked him what he made of all this.
Huidobro shrugged his shoulders.
“I was better at their age,” he claimed.
Then De Rokha showed up with Neruda.
I thought things were about to get dicey.
“Let’s have a drink, Bicho,” suggested Neruda.
“These poets bore me.”
“Yes, let’s,” said the other Pablo
(who still looked a little tipsy),
“Then we’ll duke it out by the hotel.”
“Fantastic,” answered Huidobro. “I expected nothing less.”
Then Neruda pointed a finger at me:
“And this one?” he asked.
The three of them looked at me, not saying a word.
Huidobro shrugged his shoulders again.
“Let’s go,” said Neruda.
I stood up and went with them.
Chávez and Chilean Poetry
In 2004
I was a student living in Cincinnati.
It was a little shameful
for my age and my CV.
That year
the poet Antonio Gutiérrez
came to my university.
He was Venezuelan
and I, Chilean.
So it was only right
that we should talk about Chávez and Chilean poetry.
In the morning on the way to the language department
Chávez and Chilean poetry.
At lunchtime, Chávez and Chilean poetry.
At night, nothing
(we weren’t that crazy).
One day we took the car to Washington.
A 16-hour drive there
and 16 more hours back.
Another year we went to New York
to see an exhibit on Reverón, the painter,
another 16 hours there and the same back again.
By that point
I was an expert on Venezuela
and Antonio taught classes on Chilean poetry.
But the last time we did not go
to Washington or to New York,
we just crossed the Ohio River
over that bridge
to which Huidobro dedicated a poem.
We didn’t talk about Chávez or Chilean poetry,
this time we kept quiet.
Kentucky surfaced slowly,
as if dredged up from some swampy dream,
Chávez seemed as dead as Chilean poetry
and the firmament parted in two
like a great yellow bird
breaking off from the sky
without making a sound.
Hopscotch at 7 p.m.
“And I thought about that unbelievable bit
that we had read, that a single fish will get sad in its bowl
and that all one has to do is put a mirror next to it
and the fish is happy again…”
— Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, tr. Gregory Rabassa
At 7 p.m.
overwhelmed by the Serpent Club
and its endless mental mumbo jumbo
I give up on reading Rayuela.
“Oliveira and his friends must be destroyed,” I tell myself.
There is no true love
nor any true mystery
in thinking this way.
And so, sitting in the living room armchair,
waiting for a Domino’s pizza,
I wonder when
we started edging into this disaster
and when we reached that point
from which one cannot turn back
without doing harm to others,
when the absurd
becomes a spider web of repetitions
and wrongful deeds
and leads us to the worst death of all:
the death of anonymity, of tedium,
the death of a desperate reader.
This afternoon I feel like Oliveira
walking under the rain in Paris,
sitting in a half-empty theatre
where someone’s playing
an absurd piano concert,
making of any trifle
a pretext to plunge into
the artificial rivers of metaphysics
and angle with my hands
for glorious, illusory fish.
At 7 p.m.,
doing nothing else,
I wait for a pizza with mozzarella and olives
mentally jarred
(like Oliveira in La Maga’s room)
in alien, unuseful things,
like a fish remembering its former face
in the mirror beside its own bowl.
My Country
If Fitzgerald had been born in my country
they would have labeled him frivolous.
If Truman Capote had been born in my country
they would have labeled him self-serving and a social climber.
If Hemingway had been born in my country
they would have labeled him arrogant,
a hooligan or a chauvinist pig.
If T.S. Eliot had been born in my country
they would have labeled him academic and a parvenu.
But they weren’t born in my country
(luckily)
because in my country the great Gatsby, old sport,
would have died of boredom.
Truman Capote would have moved to New York
where at least somebody would have read his books.
Hemingway would have killed himself at 25
and Eliot, without a doubt, would be Argentine.
My country, like a big empty plot,
is left to its own devices and the madness of its gods.
My country, like a desolate wasteland
shaken by a dark red storm,
means also death, time, and forgetting.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
