restoring the dead
by Douglas Messerli
Néstor Perlongher Cadavers, translated from the Spanish by Roberto Echavarren and
Donald Wellman
(Cardboard House Press, 2018)
Argentine writer Néstor Perlongher (1949-1992)
was one of the major poets arising during the early 1980s, a time when the
Argentine military “disappeared” thousands of
During these same years, he wrote six volumes of poetry, which were
collected in the 1997 volume,
Poemas
completos: 1980-1992. Previously, only a few of his poems had been
translated into English. With the release of “Cadavers” by the small publishing
house Cardboard House Press, expertly translated by Roberto Echavarren and
Donald Wellman, English speakers now have one of his major poems, from his
important 1987 volume, Alambres. As
Ezequiel Zaidenwerg notes on the book’s back cover:
“Legend has it that Prelongher wrote this poem
on the interminable bus trip from Buenos Aire to São Paulo that would take him
into exile from a regime that had paradoxically criminalized him not for his
fierce political activism, but for his militant homosexuality.”
And, as the book cover makes clear—a
rainbow-tinted X-ray of a skull—the body, the corporeality of the “disappeared”
figures is what “Cadavers” is truly
about. In Perlongher’s surrealist world, cadavers are everywhere, resurfacing
under the active glare of everyday life:
Under the brush
In the scrub
Upon the bridges
In the canals
There Are Cadavers
In the chug of a train that will not desist
In the wake of a boat that runs aground
In a wavelet, that vanishes
On the wharves loading docks trampolines piers
There Are Cadavers
In the nets of fishermen
In the tumbling of crayfish
In she whose hair is nipped
by a mall loose hairclip
There Are Cadavers
His
is a world in which these bodies reappear again and again and reveal themselves
as the individuals they once were; in this revelation, Perlongher lays bare his
fundamental love of the people of his homeland, his pleasure in their daily
life despite the horrific government under which he is living. Although his
subjects are death and torture, “Cadavers” is full of life, full of “country
girls / lavish on their pimps,” and the “the gauchos, in the fur / of that
rebel troop, in the reedbeds (wild hay), in their booty / of that boy, in the
stench of that judge’s pubic hair.”
Everywhere, the poem evokes Argentina, its people, and their resistance,
their love of live and pleasure that persists, even under the control of a
violent dictatorship.
The poet’s language is quite surreal and disjunctive. While it expresses
horrors, it also comes alive as Perlongher’s heightened language pushes his
content into another dimension:
In mama’s baskets that alternatively are
emptied or filled
with emeralds, tubes, in the tuck
of that bias that tightens — a little too much
— those bras, in the moony blue hair
seaglory, in the sucking of that squeezed tit,
in
the kneeling stool, against a mandolin,
salami, pool of smooth pipes
There Are Cadavers
As
the poem grows into a kind of rhythmic litany of the endless deaths, the poet
calls upon his own friends, living and dead, for their ethical oversights:
I don’t want to mention it, Fernando, but that
time you sent me
to the office to do the paperwork, while I
was crossing the street, a little old woman
fell down, hit by a piston rod, and
the carriages going by, with those outdate
crepes (I happen to need,
as I’ve told you, another pair of white pants) do you think
they are going to stop, Fernando? Just imagine…
There Are Cadavers
“Cadavers”
is both a dirge for the numerous deceased and an angry screed against the
regime responsible for these killings. Yet it also celebrates the beloved dead,
while the poet momentarily questions his own assertions, only to reassert the
obvious explicitness of the reality:
Allegorical coffins!
Metaphorical basements!
Metonymical teacups!
Ex—plicit!
There Are Cadavers
The
people disappear from mysterious and almost comical reasons, a son has been
“drafted,” a girl has a boyfriend in the army, but the truth is the truth.
Lightening did not kill an individual; a brutal government did. Yet in
Perlongher’s writing the person comes alive.
You Went out Alone
In the Freshness of the Night
When the Lightening Took you by Surprise
You Didn’t wear a Woolen Jacket
And
There Are Cadavers
Los Angeles, April 11, 2018
Reprinted from Hyperallergic Weekend (May 6, 2018)
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