Buenos Aires-London, Equidistancias. 2022. / Buenos Aires-London, Equidistancias. 2024.
An anthology, above all, implies leaving things out. This can happen according to one or several criteria. Both anthologies offered by the publishing house Equidistancias have the shared intention of showing what Hispano-American writers currently residing outside their countries of origin are writing. In both cases, this is done in a language that is not their own, with all this entails. The first to be published was Voces equidistantes: Poetas latinoamericanos en el Reino Unido and the second was Voces periféricas: Poetas latinoamericanos en Alemania.
These are the questions underlying both anthologies: How do we write? What is there in the writings of those who have migrated? Each of these writings is a form of individual response that carries the collective elements of any individuality, from the point of view of historical age, generation, culture, and ethnicity. And what they offer is a wide variety of tones, registers, and affiliations that are more or less visible or deliberate. At the same time, all these works share something in their story. What is most interesting in this anthology is seeing how these writings unfold, the way in which they co-exist with the culture in which they are embedded, whether they battle, speak, or dance with one another; seeing how a sense of belonging develops among them given their two-sided nature of abandonment and welcome. They allude to abandonment in the sense of leaving and then somehow missing, and to welcome in the sense of a new space in which writing develops and within which, to different degrees, writers wish to be read. These are works that are being written and whose writers want to circulate them at the same time; also, they rest upon a tradition that generated books like Paris, situación irregular, by Enrique Lihn. Are these writings twofold?
The anthology of the Latin American poets in the UK was intended to account for different aesthetics encompassing different generations without “yielding to the pressure of ‘politically correct’ criteria imposed by fashionable trends of debate in arenas that are not about aesthetics. No matter how mainstream and generous they present themselves as being, they offer no ‘quota’ or ‘positive discrimination’ related to the postcolonial, gender, or any other aspect that I consider of value when it comes to critiquing poetry,” Enrique Zattara clarifies in his prologue. In this work, there are sixteen pieces of writing that represent a wide spectrum of ways of working with verse in terms of length, cuts, and blank space on the page. They also represent a variety of tones and registers, ranging from the intimate to the ironic and the colloquial to the formal. Themes are varied, some focusing on the body and others on the relationship between language and the space in which they dwell.
In her group of poems, ranging from the intimate to the social, Juana Adcock (Mexico)—who opens the anthology, organized in alphabetical order—develops a type of writing over which the ever-present environment looms in some of her poems. This is probably the right way of interpreting her use of English as an expressive resource in “Tengo una idea para una novela”: “Y en este tumulto encontraré lugar para el pathos, / repeating elements, la illusion of unity y una resolución tan espectacular / it will soften the eye: // un ojo de agua, a word made into flesh” [And in this turmoil I will find some room for pathos, / repeating elements, the illusion of unity and a resolution so spectacular / it will soften the eye: // an eye of water, a word made into flesh].
The way in which the environment is present in the writings by Sebastián Montes (Colombia) is different. In “London Warning,” he writes: “Es la hora en que la reina toma el té / y hay un niño nepalí / que ve girar el mundo en una lavadora, / los blancos trenes del progreso humean en la lejanía / con sus vientres repletos de banqueros, / las botas de un soldado rubio / acarician dulcemente / las mejillas de una viuda afgana” [It is the time when the queen has her tea / and there is a Nepali child / who sees the world spin in a washing machine / the white trains of progress fume / smoke in the distance / with their wombs filled with bankers / the boots of a blonde soldier / lovingly stroke / the cheeks of an Afghan widower]. In this case, the ironic tone prevails. There is another relationship to place and distance expressed in the writings of Xaviera Ringeling (Chile) in the poem “En terreno ajeno” : “desde esta isla de menguantes garantías / a miles de kilómetros de distancia // suavizamos culpas con modestas transferencias electrónicas” [from this island of waning guarantees / thousands of kilometers away // we alleviate guilt with modest electronic transfers].
This is just one angle of analysis among many. This selection of poems offers us a panoramic view of the scope, vibrancy, and diversity of the poetic production in this cosmopolitan space.
“The voices encompassed in these anthologies unfold in times when exile has turned into migration and movement predominantly in Central and South America”
The anthology of Latin American poets in Germany features twenty poets and focuses on their current circulation in the scene of independent literature. It is a sample of “a defiant gesture that turns marginalization into a weapon to cause a stir in mainstream German literature,” as Timo Berger, one of the anthologists, writes in the prologue to this edition. He also states that the scene of Latin American literature in Germany, heavily centered in Berlin, is very “heterogeneous and volatile.” The poets in this anthology work on the page space in a very distinctive way. This is one of this collection’s differences from the UK anthology. Blank spaces and verse arrangement acquire a different plasticity, rendering visual poems that are impossible to reproduce here.
But, in many of them, we still come across the question of migration as a theme. The verses by the Chilean Tomás Cohen in the poem “De un trago” show this: “Masqué la última avellana que guardaba de mi patria y la vertí, traducida por mi sangre, en la boca de la encinta que tragó. Nutría yo también con mi cuerpo, con algo compuesto de mi país digerido” [I chewed the last hazelnut I had left from my homeland and poured it, translated by my blood, into the mouth of the pregnant woman who swallowed. I also nourished it with my body, with something made of my digested country]. The theme of migration is found also in the poems by poet Ramona de Jesús (Colombia): “desde qué casa esa casa / qué casa en esta boca / qué palabra / qué ruina sin historia / qué testamento / sino el huevo / de la paloma” [from what house that house / what house in this mouth / what word / what ruin without history / what testament / other than the egg / from the pigeon]. In addition to these poems, Chilean poet Israel Encina writes: “Tu país es un jardín fértil, / primero se quemaron libros, / luego hombres. / Aunque ya no se distingue / la persecución de la compañía, / sabes que tu lengua es aguja zurciendo las cosas rotas” [Your country is a fertile garden, / first books were burned / then men. / Even though it is no longer possible to tell / persecution from company, / you know your tongue is a needle sewing broken things].
This sentiment, sometimes veiled and sometimes more explicit, may be also found in the poetry of Argentine poet Giuliana Kiersz: “salgo a conocer una ciudad / que decidí hacer propia” [I go out to get to know a city / that I decided to make my own]. Changes in form and perspective, and also of other types, seem to revolve around the term decided, which is unstable in terms of hours, days, years. They also revolve around city, which carries the city-left-behind and is inhabited in different languages.
Writings that are twofold? Is this what all these voices face? How much does the sense of belonging weigh or matter in them? The following words by Eduardo Milán offer a perspective: “Exile transforms origin into language. And that is what prompts the dilemma: either creating a personal language of exile or choosing poetry, which is the exile of language.”1 The voices encompassed in these anthologies unfold in times when exile has turned into migration and movement predominantly in Central and South America. The reformulated dilemma is still there: creating a personal language of migration or choosing poetry, which can be thought of as displaced language.
Translated by Adriana Vega
1 “La lengua del origen – Eduardo Milán,” interview published on the blog Los grandes de la literatura rioplatenses by Andrés Aldao.
