Santiago de Chile: Bohío Ediciones and Viajero Ediciones, 2023. 117 pages.
More than an anthology of poems about Valparaíso, this collection is a chronicle written in poetry by the nineteen alternating and syncopated voices of poets, singers, and seafarers. This collection, illustrated by painter Fernando Concha Farias, paints brushstrokes on a city that is assembled with each wave coming in from the deep, immense Pacific Ocean. Brightness and shadow portray much of what this port city at the south of the world still preserves: “the brief weight of its name, Valparaíso…” (Patricio Manns). This coastal territory-book begins with a fragment of Alfonso Calderón’s chronicle, “Valparaiso Tocata and Fugue,” which was published in a collection of texts under the title Memorial de Valparaíso (RIL Editores, Santiago, 2001; Alfonso Calderón and Marilis Schlotfeldt). Starting from this chronicle that opens this anthology, I wish to highlight two questions that Calderón proposes: [Is Valparaíso] a concrete or a metaphysical place? What is it to be a harbor native? In addition to the verses, he quotes from another Chilean poet who arrived in this port at the beginning of the twentieth century, Salvador Reyes, who calls it: “Puerto Mayor of universal poetry.”
Is this port a concrete or a metaphysical place? Throughout the forty-five poems contained in this anthology, directed by the poets Jean Jacques Pierre-Paul and Ramón Lizana R., both planes converge from a singular experience of the traveler in transit through these places where vessels of poetry and song enter and leave. “Stultiera Navis docks at the bottom / customs do not register anything / It is like an imperceptible tremor grade 1.5 / Contraband that travels in an amygdala” (Elvira Hernández), a place that lives in words of navigation. A sense that is replicated in a polyphonic collection, full of great seafarers like Juan Camerón, and his comings and goings from Copenhagen and Gothenburg. Meanwhile, Valparaíso is named from a specific place, from the imagination of other ports, other docks where you can run aground or anchor on dry land. “On the cliff / of memories / In that pile of ashes / Like the antechamber to hell / One by one / Three thousand houses disappear in Valparaíso. / When were you born Valparaíso?” (Rosa Alcayaga Toro). A port and its burning hills, says the poet; a specific place that has become a burning pyre countless times, but that rises nevertheless. There is no metaphysics here, but rather the faithful proof of a string of hills that have beautiful names and have been planted facing the sea. In this anthology, the materiality of visions intersects with cartographical design; its references emerge not only from longing, the melancholy of a specific place, but also from the retina that even records, like a photographer of yesteryear, intimate scenes of migrants from Venezuela to the port: “There is a city outside and they say it is mine; my city is the one that rains, I write, / while the tourist centers are filled with visitors” (Alejandro Concha). The same city that contains other cities, other flaneurs who expend the tips of their pens on bar counters or desks set up in the attic, looking at the sun: “I have an intimate city / that prevents me from loving other cities / I think that is called the lover’s curse” (Jean Jacque Pierre-Paul). Between fires and references to common places in the real but also imaginary port, a cartography full of voices gives Valparaiso another opportunity to exist beyond its circumstances as port of heaven and hell at once.
“This port is a continued transit of new immigrants. We return to Alfonso Calderón’s question: what is it to be a harbor native? An inhabitant who has just arrived, or one who is setting out”
The nineteen poets appearing in this anthology are Luis Correa-Díaz, Elvira Hernández, Patricio Manns, Natasha Valdés, Carlos SmithS, María Cecilia Nahuelquín, Alejandro Concha M., Rodrigo Verdugo, Teresa Calderón, Antonio Watterson, Emilio Barraza, Isabel Rivero, Juan Cameron, Luisa Aedo Ambrosetti, Mónica Mares, Rosa Alcayaga Toro, Jean-Jacque Pierre-Paul, Osvaldo Rodríguez (El Gitano), and Ramón Lizana R. These are the voices summoned, whose visions and images range from the concrete to the metaphysical. To derive the route to the port of Valparaíso, many ports are needed, which leads us to this infatuation/enchantment with an anthologically questioned place. “What makes an object or place real?”: it may be that the answers are sciences and poetics of “being” (there); which is to say, setting a course in space-time to climb into the showcase of things that exist and are observed. A existential ritual that poets perform, blending the speculattion of metaphysics with the purest real(ity): “I arrive once again in Valparaíso / in winter and my brother / affectionately drags me / to accompany him diving / to Pichidangui with the Concha’e / Locos, it’s ours on the road / space-time to catch up” (Luis Correa-Díaz); or like the incursions of a flaneuse who writes to her father: “Dad, is all this true? / Walk through the Valparaíso cemetery / where the ancestors rest / who came from Sicily and they stayed / in the most nostalgic port in the world” (Teresa Calderón).
This port is a continued transit of new immigrants. We return to Alfonso Calderón’s question: what is it to be a harbor native? An inhabitant who has just arrived, or one who is setting out. Perhaps (s)he is the one who has left her/his hometown to find this Valparaíso as if it were another birth. Being a porteño is a crucible of winds and tides, a body that is soaked in sea fog; it is that “antidote that protects” from inland capitals. It is a coming and going of songs from and about the port encompassing views of the sun that disappears into a sailing horizon. This anthology is a perfect invitation to reread this city and its inhabitants.
Translated by Álvaro Leiva
