Not to Read by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2020-07-25T13:41:06+00:00

In ‘El Aire’ [‘Air’], one of the poems Bolaño published in Berthe Trépat, we can discern the elegiac undercurrent that would be present in his books from then on:

We are the cold hands the halted act

Of one who opened the refrigerator

At the moment death was returning

We are here to discover wonders

Let’s dream that he who couldn’t relate his story speaks

At the moment death was returning.

Bolaño is an elegiac poet. His poems constitute a challenge to death, they were written against death, like those of Breton, that black humourist. It is humour that makes poetry intelligible, that in some way makes possible the scrutiny of cadavers. Death allows for jokes, cadavers do not. A cadaver is death minus the joke. To talk about that cadaver we need the joke, and language, for Breton and company, ‘has been given to man so that he may make a surrealist use of it’. Bolaño’s vanguard is Breton’s vanguard, but it is also the vanguard of Walter Benjamin, the vanguard of those who resign themselves to the gluing together of fragments, sheltered by a diminished humour, a bitter and wavering humour, at times almost serious, at times decidedly stentorian. A guffaw of melancholy: the grin allows one to feel again that the body is body. A poem is a shot in the arm. A hit.

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