Naomi Bernstein
on translating Robert Bolaño
Aside from a few ambiguous words, the most difficult part about translating this poem was deciding whether it was one poem, or two. In his Poesía Reunida, the two sections sit on two consecutive pages, mirroring each other, and the second part has no title. The two parts have different spacing and punctuation patterns. They may very well be separate, but to me they seem inextricable, almost dialectical. I see them as a call and response — between the poet’s egoic inflation (a result perhaps of what Bolaño called “the shadow of ecstasy,” which according to him, even the worst and most “false” writers have glimpsed) and the “existential mediocrity” of his daily life.
about the author
Roberto Bolaño was a virtuosic writer who rose to prominence in the English speaking world only after his death in 2003. Through postmodern structures and flourishes, he often takes anonymous, aspiring writers as his subjects, elevating their quotidian struggles to the level of an epic. He was known to admire the life of the poet, “so excessive, so risky,” he once said. He described poetry as the gesture of an adolescent who bets what little he has on a mysterious and little known form, and “who generally loses the bet.”
about the translator
Naomi Bernstein is a rootless cosmopolitan currently living and writing in New York.
photo by Katherine Rozsypalek
