Read selections from The Night by Jaime Saenz
Poet and novelist Jaime Saenz (1921-1986) is considered the greatest Bolivian writer of the twentieth century. His poetry is apocalyptic, transcendent and hallucinatory. He lived his whole life in La Paz, Bolivia, seldom venturing out of the city. It is that indigenous culture of the place which features so prominently in all his writings. His life was defined by an intense experience of alcoholism and struggle. He sought God in unlikely places: slum taverns, alcoholic excess, and the street. Saenz was nocturnal. Occult in his politics, unashamedly bisexual, secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers, Saenz mixed the mystical and baroque with the fantastic, the psychological and the symbolic. He once stole a leg from a cadaver and hid it under his bed. On his wedding night he brought home a panther.
In The Night, Saenz explores the singular themes that possessed him: alcoholism, death, nightmares, identity, otherness and his love for La Paz. The four movements of this epic poem, 'The Night', 'The Gatekeeper', 'Interval' ,and again, 'The Night', culminate in some of the most profoundly mystical, beautiful, and disturbing passages of modern Latin American poetry.
Kent Johnson is Instructor of English and Spanish at Highland Community College. His books include Homage to the Last Avant Garde, Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz: Eleven Submissions to the War and Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz, with Forrest Gander.
A bio of Forrest Gander (with links to more pieces in this issue) can be found here.