"The Bleak Stars" by Raúl Zurita
Raúl Zurita (1950–) is a Chilean poet and artist. For almost six decades, Zurita’s work has attempted to reconcile the needs of artistic creation and political action in a world defined by brutal state violence and the absence of meaningful change. During the 1973 military coup in Chile, Zurita was detained and tortured for being a communist activist. After these events he attempted suicide, and on a later occasion tried to blind himself with ammonia. He began to write poetry at the same time. His first book of poems, Purgatorio (1979), was published as he worked as a door-to-door salesman. John Ashbery described the poetry in this collection as “by turns cold, molten, scathing, and ultimately liberating – a remarkable thing.” Since then, Zurita’s poems have been flown over New York and excavated into the Atacama Desert. He was awarded the Reina Sofia Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2020, the Pablo Neruda Ibero-American Poetry Award in 2016, and the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000.
Much of his poetry has been translated into English: Anteparadise (trans. by Jack Schmitt), Purgatory (trans. by Anna Deeny), INRI (trans. by William Rowe) and Song for His Disappeared Love (trans. by Daniel Borzutzky). Because of this, I have opted to translate an essay of his, the first from his collection Son importantes las estrellas (2018). The essay is entitled Las opacas estrellas and represents an attempt by Zurita to put into words his poetics, his answer to the question of ‘why do we write?’. Here, Zurita conceives of literature as the residue that remains of the traumas that come to define our lives, traumas that more often than not take the form of ‘extreme violence’. As he writes elsewhere, “literature is like the ashes left by a burnt corpse.” Thus, Zurita comes to identify the Chilean military coup of 1973 as part of a lineage of events that include the siege of Troy. Through this, Zurita inverts the self-image of poets who purport to belong to the ‘Western tradition’. Yes, Zurita agrees, to be a poet is to belong to a lineage that includes Homer, but what we write are not noble expressions of Western civilization but the damaged records of Western savagery. The extremes of violence that Homer records in the Iliad are not relics from an ancient era nor exceptions to the rule, they are the rule, and can still be seen today, be it in Chile or Gaza. Zurita’s conception of literature as the residue of violence does not mean he considers it to be a passive or pacifying process. On the contrary: literature is one of the ways we take the pain of our lives and mould it into a weapon with which we may try to liberate ourselves and others. This attempt may fail, will fail, but this does not preclude its absolute necessity – for Zurita or for us.
Thank you to Chris Poole and Noah Mazer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this translation. Any errors that remain are mine and not theirs.
THE BLEAK STARS
And caught the knees of Achilles in his arms, and kissed the hands that were dangerous and manslaughtering and had killed so many of his sons [Lattimore trans.]
And although below their children were being Killed, such was her beauty that they could not Cease looking at her
These two images are from the Iliad, and it is as if in these scenes we can find the most profound of that concoction made of blood, tears, dreams, betrayals and unexpected heroisms which we have persisted in simply calling ‘the human’.1 The first image comes from Canto XXIV, in which the elderly king Priam embraces the knees of Achilles and begs him to return the corpse of his son Hector. Some lines later in the poem we are told that both men cry; Achilles, as he remembers his own father Peleus and his friend Patroclus, killed by Hector; and Priam, as he remembers all his dead sons. Afterwards, Achilles’ arms will gently lift the old man to his feet and in that moment as he lifts him, Priam – and with him, the reader, we, the succeeding generations, two-thousand eight hundred years of history – all understand that Achilles will return the corpse to his father, which is to say, he will restore what the whole of humanity had lost.
It is one of the most crucial and moving scenes in the history of literature and it nonetheless should have never existed, just as the Iliad should have never existed and as literature should have never existed. The task was not to write poetry or paint paintings, the task was to make life itself a work of art – the mangled remains of that task cover the world as if they were the debris of a lost cosmic battle. These remains are the possibility of art; that infinity of poems, symphonies, paintings and frescos which, from the Homeric songs to the latest works of Nicanor Parra, fill the walls and vaults of museums, concert halls, libraries and bookstores, and which countless artists, poets, and composers like carrion-eating vultures go on retrieving and signing with their own names as if each of these remains were not the utterly undeniable testimony of a battle that has been ceaselessly lost.
In one of those battles, in a small and unassuming country, Chile, during an equally unassuming dawn – the dawn of the 11th of September 1973 – I was arrested upon arriving at the university where I studied, Federico Santa María Technical University, and while I was face down with my hands over my head, thrown onto the pavement of the adjacent street, I remembered the first time I had been there. It was seven years before, in the spring of 1966, and I was in my final year of high school. I had a certain aptitude for mathematics and had decided to study engineering at one of the three universities in Santiago. However, a teacher convinced me to instead consider visiting this one [in Valparaíso]; it had the reputation of being the best technical university in Chile and the scholarships they offered were inconceivable in other Chilean universities. I obeyed him without much enthusiasm. In the morning I took an interprovincial bus and three hours later, after a series of curves, I was struck by the sight of an imposing building that stood out on top of a promontory. The bus stopped a little further on and I retraced the path up to the entrance, then climbed the endless stone steps and, on arriving at the top, I was impressed by the vista of the Pacific. In truth, for those of us who had nothing the amenities were incredible, they gave us everything: accommodation, food, books, even clothes; but none of that was what mattered. When I finished, I returned to the bus stop on España Avenue and a few minutes later a student came out of the university and stood a few metres from me. It was only a moment, perhaps she also saw me, I’m not sure, but in that exact instant I knew that I had no other option: that engineering, the university, its amenities, meant absolutely nothing to me, because the only thing that mattered was that I saw her again. I took the exams, passed, and enrolled. I finally saw her on the fourth day, once the anxiety that she had only been a mirage had become unbearable, while on a walk that older students led for the newcomers; she was sat at the foot of a tree. Thereafter, I transformed myself into her shadow, watching her from afar day to day, month to month, year to year, until finally one day she stopped coming in. I never spoke to her.
As I was saying, I remembered this as I lay thrown on the ground next to hundreds of other students, between the roar of the sea and the soldiers’ rifle blows. We were later hurled one on top of another into military trucks and driven to the boardwalk where the ships that would serve as detention centres and torture camps were docked. There were at least a thousand of us in a hold that could barely contain a hundred and the overcrowding and the exhaustion caused us to collapse on top of each other, yet none of us were able to fall to the floor because of the lack of space. We were isolated completely by the ship’s steel walls and the only contact we had with the outer world, barring the beatings they gave us when we were taken to the deck, was the square of sky that ten metres above cut a hatch into the roof and from which we were surveilled. In that small slice of sky one could see the dawn break, the day pass by, and the sun set. On clear evenings a few stars could be seen, bleak points of light infinitely far away, which is how stars can look from the bottom of a ship’s hold. Sometimes they would close the hatch and start the ship’s engine. The darkness was absolute and all I could feel was the manifold mass of bodies pressed against mine, deforming and re-forming themselves like a black amoeba. There is nothing that palpitates more than that mess of stomachs, torsos, arms, legs, stuck together in complete darkness. It is an almost deafening heartbeat, as if it was not of only those present but the heartbeat of the whole of humanity confined to the hold of a ship.
Amidst the incomprehensible reasons that one writes, this could be one. But I would not have wanted to write poems, what I would have wanted was that the causes that lead human beings to write poems did not exist. There is one song infinitely greater than all the songs of Homer: that the songs of Homer would have never existed because the extremes of violence and madness that they bore witness to were never reached. Unlike the shadows who believe they have written them, those oft breath-taking remains we call poems do not aspire to immortality but rather oblivion: to the dream that, finally absolved of the condemnation of having to attest to human acts, poetry, as we know it, dissolves into a world that no longer needs it, because that same world – and every second within it – has become the poem. That distance, then, which bridges the gap between the poem I write and the final horizon of life as the greatest work of art, is what I have called “adversity”.
It is the first image; the second I believe I took from an essay on the Iliad, however, I have read the poem several times and I have not been able to find it, or at least find it textually. The first image is this: huddled together on top of the besieged walls of Troy, amidst dreadful cries and screams, a crowd watches in horror as just a few metres below their kin are being slaughtered by the Greeks. Women shriek as they watch their husbands be torn apart, parents watch their children be mangled, children watch their parents be mutilated – it is in this moment that Helen appears, the cause of all this misfortune, and although their children were being massacred below, her beauty was such that they all raised their eyes to see her. Paralysed, then, atop of the walls of a city permanently besieged and permanently destroyed for three thousand years, the history of poetry is the great registry of unhappiness and the countless names that adversity takes: Helena, Paris, Menelaus, Hector, Andromache, and the ashes of their razed palaces: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Baghdad, Gaza, Aleppo.
I am speaking then of that resistance installed within the heart of things that prevents us from happiness and that, like a prophecy or a confirmation, already appeared in the first line of the first poem in a story that would also come to include us: “Sing, goddess, the wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles”. It does not say “sing goddess of the beauty, the heroism, the compassion of Achilles”. No; it says sing of wrath. And wrath is wrath. Because how could something like this be written if it were not for the fact that it is the result of a fury that has not ceased even for a second? At this moment, in some place, there is a city that is being bombed, there is a neighbourhood that is being razed, and it is the permanent reiteration of this violence that seems to show us that we have not yet left the Homeric era. Moreover, it is as if blinded in a dawn full of blood, all that amalgamation of conflicting eras, of visions, of progress and obscurity, which we simply call ‘antiquity’, ‘the Middle Ages’, ‘the renaissance’, ‘modernity’, were nothing more than the remnants of a dream repeated a thousand and one times, where the sight of Troy and its imminent destruction was also the declaration of the infinite number of Troys that still awaited the world.
The extreme violence of an old man pleading for the return of his son’s corpse and the extreme violence of those unspeakable heights of beauty that leave you transfixed – what is salvageable of these debris is what we call poetry. It is analogous to what astronomers call ‘dark matter’: the energy that is present in seventy percent of the universe, which we are entirely ignorant of but without which absolutely nothing is explicable, be it the world or history. The different epochs are characterised more by what is unthinkable in them – by that which is radically and completely beyond thought – than by their achievements or successes. The state of humanity cannot be measured by how well the well-off are; rather, it must be measured by how poorly the poor are. In this very minute, in some place they are bombing a city, in a black site someone is being tortured unspeakably, in this very second a child is dying of malnutrition and starvation, and nonetheless the mere fact of being able to look, to hear, to feel, shows us daily an incredible outcome: that that unending mass of guts, tears, dreams, nightmares and unexpected heroisms which we call humanity is reborn daily upon waking up. If this wasn’t the case, suicide would be the norm.
A Spanish poet, still young and doubtlessly talented, proclaimed that anyone incapable of writing a sonnet was not a poet. I would like to believe him, I myself have written dozens of sonnets, none, unfortunately, equal to those of Francisco de Quevedo, which is why I have torn them all up mercilessly. I don’t know whether the poet himself has achieved this, but I’m afraid that his requirement is insufficient. The aim is not to write a sonnet or not, the aim is to kill a man. Whoever is incapable of killing another person will never be an artist; but whoever does so is an abhorrent killer. Between these margins dwells art. We have not been happy. That is the only lesson we can cleanly draw from history, and it is the only reason why we write. It is thus, irredeemably so, but at the same time those remains, those mountains of paintings and texts, of frescos and symphonies, are also the only proof that there has been a battle and that this battle continues to rage freely: the one that second by second millions and millions of human beings on the face of the earth are fighting so that they may become human and continue being so.
In a world of victims and aggressors, that heap of rubble and mangled remains which we call poetry is the hope of that which has no hope, it is the possibility of that which has absolutely no possibility, it is the love of that which has no love. Burned in cities that continue to smoulder forever, obliterated in sagas which should have never existed, in songs which should have never been sung, in tragedies that should have been averted, poetry has been my struggle for the construction of Paradise – even though absolutely all evidence at hand indicates that this aim is madness.
I return to Santa María University. Those two moments meld in my mind: the image of a man, still young, with his face smashed against the pavement, who amidst kicks remembered the circumstances that had first brought him there, and the image of a high schooler who in that same place, sees a woman – another student – without knowing, as I know now, that there was all the rot, all the cowardice and temerity, dreams, failures, joys and sacrifices of that which would become his life. I believe that these superimposed images, that of a man whose face is being burst open by blows and that of the same man at a younger age who devastated, doubled over by love, looks at someone from afar without even daring to say his name, are the foundation of the mistake that I have called ‘my poetry’.
It is love that I am talking about. I do not know how to talk of other things; it is my only subject. All my poems, or, better said, those pages I have recovered amidst the ruins, are love poems. It is not possible for me to go much further than this. Despite it all, in what was surely an image born of delirium, I seemed to perceive that sky filled with the stars of our love.
I am referring to those bleak stars that for forty-four years I have been gazing at from deep within a ship, in my nightmares, in my horror, in my love and in my hope.
I have chosen to translate the title of the essay Las estrellas opacas as ‘The Bleak Stars’. The natural choice for translating opaco would be ‘opaque’, but opaco has a significant emotional resonance that ‘opaque’ fails to capture. While opaco, like ‘opaque’, denotes an obscure density that impedes the passage of light, it also has a dismal or melancholic sense. Because this dual sense of both a visual and spiritual diminishment is fundamental to the essay, I opted not to go with ‘opaque’. In English, words with a similar dual sense are ‘gloomy’ or ‘somber’. However, the connotations of these words - the former of schooldays spent learning about Gothic literature and the latter of a dour seriousness - made them inappropriate for the essay. I ultimately went with ‘bleak’ as an approximation for opaco, as a bleak star captures the paradoxical notion of a dark or obscure source of light and the accompanying emotional resonance.