Immanent Visitor "fm04"

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By Way of Introduction

Poet and novelist Jaime Saenz (1921–1986) lived his whole life in La Paz, Bolivia, seldom venturing beyond that thin-aired and scarcely believable city. His life was defined by an intense experience of alcoholism, a struggle, eventually lost, that was wedded to what Leonardo García-Pabón, one of the leading scholars on Saenz's work, has called a "monastic" dedication to writing.

[1] Saenz succeeded in staying sober, with a few brief, notorious setbacks, for almost twenty years (the period of his greatest output). He succumbed again to drink in the year leading up to his death. His final book of poetry, La noche (The night) is a harrowing and moving account of alcoholic experience.

There was in his persona a near-total rejection of the social niceties and conventions of polite society. Quite to the letter, in fact, Saenz embodied, for much of his adult life, the late-Romantic idea of the poète maudit—apocalyptic and occult in his politics, habituous of slum taverns, unashamedly bisexual, insistently nocturnal in his artistic affairs, secretive in his leadership of a select group of writers—and he became, in the staid and tradition-bound circles of Bolivian high culture, the ongoing subject of rumor and gossip.

For a number of years in his youth, Saenz worked as a cultural liaison with the U.S. Information Service.

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Later he worked on and off as a journalist and professor and maintained important friendships with painters, composers, and intellectuals. But he essentially lived in poverty all his life. He wrote by night and drank excessively, and his public behavior was sometimes scandalous. In the 1960s and 1970s, while his great Bolivian contemporary, Oscar Cerruto, was gaining a reputation for poetry of formal and psychological nuance, and as the global reach of postmodernism was beginning to rush literature into radical new forms, Saenz, stubbornly mystical and baroque, was on his own. His work was certainly innovative, absorbing the fantastic, the psychological, and the symbolic. But it wasn't formally radical enough to situate him among the international avant-garde; it wasn't politically specific enough to find favor with the ascendant literary left, and it was too weird to ride into popularity on the coattails of writers like Cortázar and Vargas Llosa during the Latin American boom of the 1970s. The artists and writers of his generation recognized him as a major force, but until Blanca Wiethüchter wrote a tide-turning book-length study of his poetry, late in his career, Saenz's work was published to a general critical silence. Today, he is widely regarded as Bolivia's most original and visionary poet. While his brilliant and courageous fiction still remains little known outside his own nation, his poetry has recently been translated and published in a number of European countries and is gaining increasing attention

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there and throughout Latin America as among the most compelling and idiosyncratic of the Spanish-speaking world.

[2] Saenz's published novels are Felipe Delgado (Felipe Delgado, 1979) and Los papeles de Narciso Lima-Acha (The papers of Narciso Lima-Acha, 1991). The latter, originally written in the 1960s, and recognized as one of Bolivia's greatest works of fiction, is also one of Latin America's first openly gay novels. Saenz's poetry includes the following books: El escalpelo (The scalpel, 1955), Muerteporeltacto (Deathbyfeel, 1957), Aniversario de una visión (Anniversary of a vision, 1960), Visitante profundo (Immanent visitor, 1964), El frío (The cold, 1967), Al pasar un cometa (As the comet passes, 1982), Recorrer esta distancia (To cross this distance, 1973), Bruckner (Bruckner, 1978), Las tinieblas (The darknesses, 1978), and La noche (The night, 1984). El escalpelo, Muerte por el tacto, Aniversario de una visión, Visitante profundo, El frío, and Recorrer esta distancia have been collected into a single volume as Obra poética (Poetic work, La Paz: Biblioteca del Sesquicentenario de la Republica, 1975). The following are among a growing body of critical essays in Spanish on the poetry of Saenz: Blanca Wiethüchter, "Estructuras de lo imaginario en la obra poética de Jaime Saenz" (Structures of the imaginary in the poetic work of Jaime Saenz), a book-length essay presented as critical Appendix to Obra poética (ed. cit.); Luis H. Antezana, "La obra poética de Jaime Saenz" (The poetic work of Jaime Saenz) in Hombres y letras (Men and letters), no. 1 (1979); Maria Julia de Ruschi Crespo, "El ropaje y la música: Un ensayo sobre Jaime Saenz" (Robes and music: An essay on Jaime Saenz) in Usos de la imaginación (Uses of the imagination, Buenos Aires, 1984), and Leonardo García-Pabón, "Escribir antes y después de la muerte/Sobre la obra poética de Jaime Saenz" (Writing before and after death/On the poetic work of Jaime Saenz) in Revista Iberoamericana 134 (1986): 285–89).

A propulsive, energetic rhythmical drive and an aching emotional expressiveness hold the poems of Jaime Saenz together, even as they seem to burst

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from the syntactical conventions of familiar language practices. Like most of the important modernist poets, Saenz has been called "difficult," but the poems are not difficult to feel. In long lines, in odes that name desire, with Whitmanesque anaphora, in exclamations and repetitions, Saenz addresses the reader, the beloved, and death in one extended lyrical gesture. The poems are brazenly affecting. Their semantic difficulty lies, chiefly, in the odd heterogeneity of their formal and tonal structures, which careen, unabashedly, between modes and moods: now archly lyrical, now arcanely symbolic, now man-in-the-street colloquial, now trancelike in pronominals crambling sat the seeming edge of glossolalia.

For a poet continually astounded both by the fact of being alive and by the obdurate nearness of death, a poet surrounded both by the jubilant exaltation of living and by the poverty and despair of a degraded world, paradox weaves together the nature of experience. In Saenz's poems the sacred word and silence, quotidian sensibility and psychic ecstasy, a spectral "I" and "you" are always interacting in a dialectic that surges toward the potential for perception and language to ignite revelation. It is important, and here also paradoxical, that such revelation for Saenz lay hidden and expectant in death. But far from being the mere consequence orresidue of linear time, death's phenomenal expression is, for the poet, more like a capsuled configuration of space, the

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eruption of a wormhole, so to say, that beckons and leads—though the living can hardly yet follow—into an adjoining dimension of intensified and unbounded presence. To Saenz, death's material, bodily manifestation is the still-wet shore between realms, a wavelike arrival and slow drawing back, the whispered lapping of an unfathomable totality he calls "real life." And it is this fundamental conjoining of existences that is the master conceit of his great poem To Cross This Distance (Recorrer esta distancia, 1973). Death's immanence as the indivisible and necessary ground of life and love haunts all of Saenz's work and connects it, significantly, to the spiritual world of the Indians in Bolivia.

In this sense, if Saenz's poetry can be said to exist under the sign of the hermetic, it is a hermeticism that is not so much in the typical function of language experiment and avant-garde social critique as it is in service of a visionary impulse unapologetic in its romanticism and in its identification with indigenous Bolivian cultures. By emphasizing nonlinear time, suspended states of knowing, and mystical realms of death and by conflating memory, death, linguistics, and sensual experience into any given moment of experience, Saenz connects his poetry to the visionary world of the Kallawaya, Aymara, and Quechua, with which he was fascinated. The influence of Aymara culture can be seen as well in his talismanic words, his symmetrical grammatical structures, and

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his affirmation of conceptual opposites. At times, though, in the way he transposes profound feeling into a language of paradox, Saenz can sound, to ears tuned to Western literature, very much like the Petrarch of Sonnet 118:

Now here I am, alas, and wish I were elsewhere, and wish I wished more, but wish no more, and, by being unable to do more, do all I can

Never merely plumping anaive Romanticism, where words "come after" intense feeling and "express" it, Saenz's language emphatically constitutes the initiatory field. At once numinous and material, then, his poetry is both bottomless riddle and the very means for bridging and canceling the central antinomies—self and other, mind and world, indigenous and colonial, the living and the dead—that fuel the thematic of his artistic quest.

It is in this sense that his work, in a deeply multiethnic and multilingual Bolivia, constitutes much more than an instance of bohemian or elitist aestheticism. As García-Pabón has pointed out, its powerful clearing of a free zone of expression at the center of "high culture" has reinforced and extended the resistance of marginalized languages and voices to a single literature or hegemonic worldview. Such a legacy is coextensive with the life of a poet who enacted in his writings and personal relations a fierce compassion

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and solidarity with the destitute, the desperate, the disenfranchised.

The strangeness of Saenz's work should be read, in this sense, as the exfoliation of a singular empathy and yearning for otherness. His poems are the flowering of a life given over in fullness to an art that affirms the mysterious unity of all difference, of suffering and ecstasy. Now, as his poetry is translated in Europe and the United States and its appeal and importance are acknowledged, Jaime Saenz, one of Latin America's great poets of the twentieth century, is garnering the international audience his work deserves.