Three Poems from Mario Meléndez’s Waiting for Perec
Translated from the Spanish by Jeremy Paden
#32
I saw Kafka in the toy room
He was conducting an infinite train
on tracks that seemed like eels
Under the bed another kid disarmed
a fluorescent caterpillar
The caterpillar had Kafka’s face
also the furniture, the clocks
the walls had his face
the bored spiders in their webs
the toys in the room
The only one who did not have Kafka’s face
was Kafka himself, his face
was like an empty page
#32
Vi a Kafka en el cuarto de los juguetes
Conducía un tren infinito
sobre rieles que parecían anguilas
Bajo la cama otro niño desarmaba
una oruga fluorescente
La oruga tenía el rostro de Kafka
también los muebles, los relojes
las paredes tenían su rostro
las arañas aburridas en sus telas
los juguetes en la habitación
El único que no tenía el rostro de Kafka
era el propio Kafka cuyo rostro
semejaba una página en blanco
#33
I saw Heraclitus in the river of his childhood
Every time I bathe I am other, he said
my body takes on the form of my mother
takes on the form of my dead grandfather
the form of a strange gentleman
How many times must I enter this river
to recover my body
He then jotted down in a notebook
the date of his first transformation
But as he returned to the water
he underwent infinite permutations
until he changed into a fish
That night he threw his notebook into the river
& slipped away on the current
convinced he would never be the same
#33
Vi a Heráclito en el río de su infancia
Cada vez que me baño soy otro, decía
mi cuerpo toma la forma de mi madre
toma la forma de mi abuelo muerto
la forma de un extraño caballero
Cuántas veces he de entrar a este río
para recuperar mi cuerpo
Entonces anotaba en un cuaderno
la fecha de su primera transformación
Pero a medida que tornaba al agua
sufría infinitas derivaciones
hasta quedar convertido en pez
Esa noche lanzó su cuaderno al río
y se fue deslizando por la corriente
convencido que jamás sería el mismo
#41
unless you’re a relative of God
don’t come near these parts
heaven is a bag of cats
I saw God through the rearview mirror
as we left a see-through tunnel
We were traveling at top speed
dressed for a party of ashes
Everyone wore a mask
& a stone tied to their neck
to jump in the first river
We wandered all night through a salt desert
raving about the promised land
In the back seat the muses yawned
they showed their breasts through the window
like archeological remains
The cats we’d forgotten in the trunk
had foretold the future
None of you will see the dawn, they said
with a certainty that gave us goosebumps
In the last gas station we bought cigarettes
& fed the cats before leaving them behind
They caterwauled on the side of the road
when we revved our engines
The moon was a garlic braid
stuck to the windshield
the stars were like stakes
that longed for our hearts
With the first rays of sunlight
we began to disappear
The cats were right, I said
cranking up the radio
while I watched the Sex Pistols
in the rearview mirror
#41
Si no es pariente de Dios
no se acerque por estos lados
el cielo es una bolsa de gatos
Vi a Dios por el espejo retrovisor
mientras salíamos de un túnel transparente
Viajábamos a toda velocidad
vestidos para una fiesta de cenizas
Cada quien llevaba una máscara
y una piedra atada al cuello
para lanzarnos en el primer río
Vagamos toda la noche por un desierto de sal
delirando con la tierra prometida
En el asiento trasero las musas bostezaban
sacaban sus pechos por la ventana
como si fueran restos arqueológicos
Los gatos que olvidamos en la cajuela
nos habían predicho el futuro
Ninguno verá el amanecer, confesaron
con una certeza que nos paraba los pelos
En la última gasolinera compramos tabaco
y alimentamos los gatos antes de abandonarlos
Maullaban a un lado del camino
cuando encendimos motores
La luna era una trenza de ajo
pegada al parabrisas
las estrellas semejaban estacas
que añoraban nuestro corazón
Con los primeros rayos de luz
comenzamos a desaparecer
Razón tenían los gatos, dije
subiendo el volumen de la radio
mientras veía a los Sex Pistols
por el espejo retrovisor
The title of Mario Meléndez Muñoz’s book-length linguistic collage Waiting for Perec pays homage to both Samuel Beckett and Georges Perec, announcing that the world conjured by this book is an absurd space where both fiction and poetry melt into the philosophical and the theological. The individual poems in the collection involve short, tight, polished gems of macabre humor where God wanders dark streets, looking for his son. The dreamscape could easily be the one through which Saint John of the Cross moves during his “Dark Night of the Soul,” or the Paris of Baudelaire’s “Spleen,” or that world just on the other side of Alice’s looking glass. Meléndez’s own short, prefatory comment to the book announces that the poems are “visions narrated by an urn maker.”
Certainly Meléndez is a bricoleur, weaving his text through references to art (Picasso, Botero), music (John Lennon, Charlie Parker), film (Buster Keaton, Marilyn Monroe), other poets (Vallejo, Pessoa), and fiction writers (Verne, Cervantes). While Lewis Carroll is not mentioned in the book itself, the serious playfulness of Carroll’s Victorian nonsense is certainly apparent. (In one poem, God’s pet hamster is cheered on by a dog tossing about holy water as it runs a race while death rides a wooden tricycle.) In various interviews, Meléndez has in fact mentioned Carroll as a touchstone for how he understands literature. But though Meléndez winks at how the likes of Carroll and Edward Lear played with the much older tradition of anthropomorphic animals in children’s moralizing literature, these poems traffic even more deeply in ironic, absurdist humor, and create a world of nightmares and dreamscapes that wrestle with the idea of literature in the 21st century.
In the three poems published here in The Dodge, we see Carroll’s strange anthropomorphic animals embodied in the vatic cats left by the side of the road in poem 41 and in the caterpillar that had Kafka’s face in poem 32. Indeed, the explicit reference to Kafka and the way Heraclitus turns into a fish in poem 33 moves Meléndez’s use of animals more toward the uncanny and the oneiric of early 20th century surrealism than just humorous Victorian nonsense, with the allusions to Kafka’s metamorphizing face and to dreams that turn ghoulish and evaporate at dawn evidencing the skewing weight of tradition. Horses, dogs, hamsters, rats, worms, cats, and crows, among others, parade throughout the collection. Yet, the world conjured by these poems is too strange for these animals to function in traditionally moralizing ways. They are real in the wild way anything is real, either on or off the page. Even the cats that prophesy the death of the speaker and his companions are still just hungry cats, forgotten in a car’s trunk and abandoned by the wayside.
Mario Meléndez (Linares, Chile, 1971) is the author of six collections of poems: Notes for a Legend, Underground Flight, The Paper Circus, Death's Days Are Numbered, Waiting for Perec, and The Loneliness Wizard. Of these, Notes for a Legend has been translated and published in English by Valparaíso USA. He has also been translated into Italian, Persian, Russian, German, and several other languages. When he lived in Mexico City in the 90s and early 00s, he oversaw the Latin American Poets Series published by Laberinto ediciones, and he served as editor for various anthologies of Chilean and Latin American poetry. Between 2012 and 2018, he lived in Italy. In 2013 he received the President's Medal from the Don Luigi di Liegro International Foundation for his poetry. Between 2014 and 2016, he edited two anthologies of Latin American poetry for Raffaelli editore, based in Rímini. In 2018 he returned to Chile to serve as the Editor in Chief of the Vicente Huidobro Foundation, and founded Revista Altazor.
Jeremy Paden is professor of Latin American literature at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, and is on faculty at Spalding University's low-residency MFA. He has published translations of contemporary Argentine, Colombian, Chilean, Mexican, and Spanish poetry. He is also a poet who has published three chapbooks and two full-length collections. The latter two are: world as sacred burning heart (3: A Taos Press, 2021) and the bilingual Self-Portrait as an Iguana (Valparaíso USA, 2021). Self-Portrait, written originally in Spanish, was named co-winner of the inaugural Poeta en Nueva York Prize. His bilingual and illustrated children's book Under the Ocelot Sun/Bajo el sol del ocelote (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2020), on the migrant caravan crisis, won a 2020 Campoy-Ada Prize awarded by the North American Academy of the Spanish Language for Children's Literature in Spanish.
Published April 15 2023