I never liked the role of the reader of new releases. Although contemporary poetry is one of my interests, I particularly love the gems that I discover at the wrong time, or with a different nuance: out of step. Over the years, I have learned to allow myself these late arrivals, to consider that the unknown (and in the field of poetry publications, so numerous and so short-lived, this has galactic dimensions) can be an investment in surprising satisfactions rather than a deficit. Understanding the activity of reading as an exercise in competition would be a mistake capable of destroying the essence of it all: pleasure.
I had read a dozen books by Mario Arteca (La Plata, 1960) (eleven in total, not counting anthologies) until a few weeks ago, when I came across Bestiario búlgaro in the beautiful Malisia bookshop in La Plata (if you visit the city, don’t miss it).
The Vox edition (2004) is a luxury. It encompasses the entire idea of the poetic object (see Ulises Carrión, 1975), of physical experience as a literary body carried out with singular delicacy. More than in any other genre, the first editions of poetry “booklets” are another signifier of the artistic act; the materials, the source, the space, all become formats for reading. I felt this long ago when, after poring over Alejandra Pizarnik’s Poesía Completa (Lumen, 2000), I discovered her individual volumes in the university library. Looking back, I could say the same of other works, beautiful in their first editions, such as Marinero en Tierra by Rafael Alberti or Veinte poemas para ser leídos en el tranvía by Girondo.
Returning to Bestiario búlgaro, the game begins with a kind of horizontal album with a clasp, inside which is a plaquette (designed by Carlos Mux, Almicar Gutiérrez, and Milton López). On both covers we find illustrations of teriocéphales, foreshadowing the concept of an exotic bestiary and the suspicion of something more.
However, when we open the book, we are greeted by a page from a German fashion magazine. A pair of female eyes with bangs look diagonally at the title and the author: the delicacy contrasts with the bestiality announced. Where are we going then?
A map begins to take shape: Sofia, Philippopolis, Plovdiv… places and—inevitable in Arteca’s poetry—books: Ivan Kafallo’s Crónicas profanas, for example, which appear as an intertext interfered with by Elias Canetti and Charles Simic. Arteca is a traveler of literature, a man marveling at the gardens of words.
“You were frozen, unable to understand
if it is the word that carries its manure
or the miserable manipulation
of its combinations.
You spread your humor over what is written,
the size of the things you spit out,
the skin that descends until you feel the explosion.
We know nothing of doubt on paper,
and now we write even on a piece of
satin, a wrapping sweeter
than its contents (…)”
We read in other poems: “The industry that concerns / the living is no bargain for these dead,” “The peace we made / reaches its style in ingratitude.” The political tension between East and West is present: Bulgaria had ceased to be communist in 1989 and became a member of NATO in the same year this book was published. The Bulgarian economic crisis during its transition to democracy reminds us a lot of our own situation in Argentina in 2001, when privatization, IMF demands, unemployment, and poverty led to the collapse of government institutions. In some way, Arteca finds a connection in the fabric of the neoliberal model that constitutes a particular type of society. Nostalgia only returns a blurred image of names and things that can no longer be defined; much of what was elementary yesterday is now useless. The volatile nature of the new Western life (which in Argentina meant the farce of a post-Menem third way) ends up undermining the foundations of society and culture.
Consumption, superficiality, photographs as the focus of a gaze that accelerated by virtue of individualism (proto-social media), all of this is synthesized in the last poem of this work, a piece of poetic clockwork entitled “Zentralpark.” This spelling, allusive to communism, puts all the irony in the foreground. I quote the entire text because it is worth it:
“They looked more like glass,
bulbs emerging round
and strange, stirring the water.
The women were heavy.
They were not generous at all.
Only a pond between them and them.
Now that the revulsion has passed,
the palate opens without a corolla,
like any light cleaning
the air in flowers. And they flee
backward—where else?—
insects, sometimes ordinary.
That light showed me where
to place my feet on the way back.
Suddenly everything went dark,
in eclipse.
I had to do it, and I looked:
the disturbance was breaking up
into countless lanes,
returning toward me through a
European winter canal
and a lot of mud between the soles.
Until a sound made me look up.
They were still there, standing
on the fresh grass, like trees.”
The offer is that of a disturbing mirror image. Heavy life remains outside that trance after the thaw. The winds now bring signs that can be grouped together for no reason. It is the cycle of a world not so different in its parts. Could poetry help us understand the movement of the threads of these subjects—men or women, it doesn’t matter—with bird heads and protruding limbs? If language from now on (this now, which will be again) is left behind by materials, how can we tell the story? Beauty seems to be able to move like water or like old Priam, among the dead and the weapons, among contradictions and paper figures. There is no naive simplification or propagandistic reduction of the issue. That is the point that serves us: the issue being questioned. Let’s put it this way: while the pillars of empires collapse, we feed on the scraps from all sides, we know—human, deeply human—how to redefine the value of what for a few—the powerful—is seen as the hangover of time.
