Apocalypses with Amazons

Reviewed by Mariela Griffor

Author: Jorge Etcheverry

Publisher: Editorial Antares: http://www.glendon.yorku.ca/antares/english/editorial.html


  I like very much the tension of existential discharge contained in the pages. I like the feelings of anxiety and brusque, or better said the brutal, mental fracture that comes from some of the short stories in this collection. The shortest of these stories, and the one that bears the title of the book itself, Apocalypses with Amazons, is my favorite. It took me years to understand the work of Etcheverry and I’m not saying this for it being a lesser qualification but rather for its surrealistic complexity. It is representative of the works of the School of Santiago, created in the sixties whose slogan was “Here exists neither poetry nor prose: here exists only The Word.” A linguistic slogan that included later on the cultural class of exile.

Apocalypse of the Amazons is different from other books of magic realism coming from Chilean expat Etcheverry, it is precise and chooses his characters carefully. He portrays the feminine characters as strong, attractive, smart, vulnerable and as intellectuals. His feminine characters never subdue. Many times these women are stronger, wiser.

I’m not surprised that an author like Etcheverry had strong political views that creates an environment where reality is ‘fixed’ into an ulterior development where human values prevail, where human rights are saved and preserved, instead of the despots profiting of a modern society. Like searching for a perfect escape from a sordid reality, Etcheverry tries to ‘fix’ the outcome from the negative impact that a world that excludes so many, caused in the mind and soul of its members. The human spirit prevails in wonderful trips as “a bird that crossed the sky of fire, casting over the world the texts of what is called the operative Magic.”

Despite the criticism and cynicism from the diary of Alberto Magno, the lines of “his” literary Alberto Magno, the lines of his faithful belief in humanity pour out in some of the lines: “And like this as a species of spiritual animal, overfed and misbalanced, impregnated over all existence in the Middle Ages, amplified to the square by technology that ended demonstrating that the ideas, religions and beliefs flowing over the grey world that doesn’t produce only dragons burning the skies, but also other entities, Greta Garbo and I leave the reality flow according our desires …”.

Read this book, it will make you think. You will enjoy the reading. Etcheverry writes in this book about themes that are important, such insertion, acclimatization, dislocation, language decay and the search for the common in us. We share with him his love for the continent. His search, is a continuous search for making people from “the other Americas” more recognizable to the North.



  Jorge Etcheverry, born in 1945, is a former member of the School of Santiago and Grupo América from the 1960s. He lives in Canada and has published poetry, prose, criticism and various articles in several countries. His books of poetry are: The Escape Artist (1981); La Calle (1986); The Witch (1986); Tánger (1991); A Vuelo de Pájaro (1998); Vitral con Pájaros (2004); and Reflexión Hacia el Sur (2004). Lately, he has appeared in anthologies such as Cien microcuentos chilenos (2002); Los poetas y el general (2002); Anaconda, Antología di Poeti Americani (2003); El lugar de la memoria. Poetas y narradores de Chile (2007); Latinocanadá (2007); Poéticas de Chile. Chilean Poets (2007); 100 cuentos breves de todo el mundo (2007); and The Changing Faces of Chilean Poetry: A Translation of Avant Garde, Women's, and Protest Poetry (2008). 

   

   

 

Jorge Etcheverry

Translated from Spanish by Kate Grim-Feinberg

Look: A lot of water’s gone under the bridges. A seagull

from who knows where flies in circles over those bridges,

over the river and the mountains. Over the roof of the tallest

buildings, under the sun

 

–Together we will or won’t have a chance to imitate those paths

of the birds–at our level, over the earth

 

The only thing that will rise up is the twisted flower of our

conversations–its petals without contours, with no upper vertex

Listen to me. Hide your claws. Bury the warrior’s axe

these are not the times of your Indian ancestors. Where else

would your high cheek bones have come from?

 

–There are no more potato-eating Irishmen. The Acadians

buried the rifle and the cross. My grandparents with their Basque

berets no longer cruise the southern seas.  My probable

Sephardic ancestors have allowed the traces of their

lineage to be erased in that temperate southern country

 

–Don’t listen to the measured words from the city,

whose periphery we inhabited, advising you to be calm, sweet,

everything in moderation. Stop going to the pushover therapist,

educated in the suburbs, just out of college. The people

who know say two things:

 

–Poetry is subject to a specific form (this sounds like

prose)

–It has to be about universal themes that everyone can

understand. Don’t cook fish by itself and don’t bake the cookies.

Don’t walk the streets of Chinatown, sulky, remembering. Accept

the complicity of my eyes more than that of my hands. Of

my brain more than that of my genitals. Undo the tangle that

imprisons us as you would pull the kernels off a dry cob of corn,

like the ones you use to feed the pigs on your farm...

 
There’s a reason we’re the only real poets around here,

in this place filled with small circles, professors in suits, and

housewives who write in their free time. Like a hungry condor

our poetry has to let itself be carried away by the storm. Deposit

your life in this rhythm that’s come from the other side of the

world, that joins yours, a current that sprouts from the

North Pole. Together we can do anything, even revolution. I is not

an other.

 

I is an other, if you didn’t like the one I was wearing before

I’ll hide my claws and file my fangs. I’ll cover up

my tail with a long coat. I will cut my hair and look for

work. I will stop drinking coffee with my female friends,

always endowed with ulterior motives.

–I’m going to stop laughing at the poets here in the recitals.

I’ll stop drinking beer and smoking. I’ll stop eating

raw oatmeal in the morning—it makes me nervous—

with honey or sugar, or with jelly if there’s any

around.

 

You’ll go back to wearing your long faded skirts, and tying

your hair with a ribbon. And gathering herbs in the river

 

And I’m telling you for the last time: A walk through Chinatown

is worth more than the best published book. A cup of coffee

at the market while listening to a certain street musician is worth

more than a reading at Harbour Front.

 

I’m going to buy new blue jeans. I will say hello to your

feminist friends. The architecture of what must be done

rises up, still transparent, vague, and complicated,

like a Piranesi. This advice sounds fishy (the sacred

animal of Edessa). We must recover the space of these

thoughtless and hard-working people

 

The fact that we’re together is a universal revolution (assuming

I haven’t gone completely crazy)

 

Your friends and mine tore their hair out, tore their clothing,

threw ashes on their heads

And left with their music for some other place.

Apocalypses with Amazons, Reviewed by Mariela Griffor

Author: Jorge Etcheverry

Publisher: Editorial Antares: http://www.glendon.yorku.ca/antares/english/editorial.html

I like very much the tension of existential discharge contained in the pages. I like the feelings of anxiety and brusque, or better said the brutal, mental fracture that comes from some of the short stories in this collection. The shortest of these stories, and the one that bears the title of the book itself, Apocalypses with Amazons, is my favorite. It took me years to understand the work of Etcheverry and I’m not saying this for it being a lesser qualification but rather for its surrealistic complexity. It is representative of the works of the School of Santiago, created in the sixties whose slogan was “Here exists neither poetry nor prose: here exists only The Word.” A linguistic slogan that included later on the cultural class of exile.

Apocalypse of the Amazons is different from other books of magic realism coming from Chilean expat Etcheverry, it is precise and chooses his characters carefully. He portrays the feminine characters as strong, attractive, smart, vulnerable and as intellectuals. His feminine characters never subdue. Many times these women are stronger, wiser.

I’m not surprised that an author like Etcheverry had strong political views that creates an environment where reality is ‘fixed’ into an ulterior development where human values prevail, where human rights are saved and preserved, instead of the despots profiting of a modern society. Like searching for a perfect escape from a sordid reality, Etcheverry tries to ‘fix’ the outcome from the negative impact that a world that excludes so many, caused in the mind and soul of its members. The human spirit prevails in wonderful trips as “a bird that crossed the sky of fire, casting over the world the texts of what is called the operative Magic.”

Despite the criticism and cynicism from the diary of Alberto Magno, the lines of “his” literary Alberto Magno, the lines of his faithful belief in humanity pour out in some of the lines: “And like this as a species of spiritual animal, overfed and misbalanced, impregnated over all existence in the Middle Ages, amplified to the square by technology that ended demonstrating that the ideas, religions and beliefs flowing over the grey world that doesn’t produce only dragons burning the skies, but also other entities, Greta Garbo and I leave the reality flow according our desires …”.

Read this book, it will make you think. You will enjoy the reading. Etcheverry writes in this book about themes that are important, such insertion, acclimatization, dislocation, language decay and the search for the common in us. We share with him his love for the continent. His search, is a continuous search for making people from “the other Americas” more recognizable to the North.

 

Jorge Etcheverry, born in 1945, is a former member of the School of Santiago and Grupo América from the 1960s. He lives in Canada and has published poetry, prose, criticism and various articles in several countries. His books of poetry are: The Escape Artist (1981); La Calle (1986); The Witch (1986); Tánger (1991); A Vuelo de Pájaro (1998); Vitral con Pájaros (2004); and Reflexión Hacia el Sur (2004). Lately, he has appeared in anthologies such as Cien microcuentos chilenos (2002); Los poetas y el general (2002); Anaconda, Antología di Poeti Americani (2003); El lugar de la memoria. Poetas y narradores de Chile (2007); Latinocanadá (2007); Poéticas de Chile. Chilean Poets (2007); 100 cuentos breves de todo el mundo (2007); and The Changing Faces of Chilean Poetry: A Translation of Avant Garde, Women's, and Protest Poetry (2008).  

Reflection towards the South

English translation of the opening pages of the book 'Reflexión hacia el Sur', published in 2004

We are a people strangely endowed by nature. I’ve never liked comments that suggest ethnocentrism

But we have to acknowledge we Chileans have been shaped by a set of determinants that are out of our hands. Geographic features, an elongated coast, a couple of mountain ranges, stretching from the tropics to the pole

We have asked ourselves while writing these prolegomena, the pen hovering over a piece of paper covered with horizontal lines what made the Araucanians resist the conquistadors for so many centuries

As a people we’ve not been denied a double brightness, like the moon reflected in a pool, of military victories, of cultural accomplishments at a universal level

Social upheavals, martyrs, a utopia nearly at hand. Strangled by her own umbilical cord. Abandoned in the wastelands of history

The impression I’ve always had is that of a kind of a seedbed needing lots of water and sun to bear fruit

Under the calm surface of the earth vast movements are gestating

At times the affluent classes believe they’re able to perceive this rumour, part tremor, part snore, which doesn’t let them sleep in peace, that paralyzes fingers holding glasses in the midst of parties and social reunions, looks fixed and vacant

As if an enormous bird, invisible and sinister, had flown overhead, making the entire Barrio Alto of Santiago pass through the perimeter of a tip of a wing

Like that, vast and slow, mute for decades, like healthy children of long gestation who suddenly start to walk

Like that, profound and terrible are not only the social movements but their signs 

Certain displacements of the structures of power, some cultural manifestations

Are no more than the signs of those underground movements

 As if Earth near the South Pole were a woman sleeping and dreaming the profound dream that comes with the heavy digestion of historical events, after the ingestion of a good many currents of blood

 

 

At the coast the sea turns red. Seagulls fly overhead in circles, excited
The molten lava that warms her skin flows through her veins. Her fingers move spasmodically as a reflex and she whimpers in dreams

Which are the vast fabric of sayings, maxims and refrains, the music created and the poetry written in the four corners of Santiago, in the far North, flat and desert-like, in the far South, rugged, cold and scattered over islands

We are a people strangely endowed by nature. We adapt easily to other countries though we never integrate

The adventurous nature, the laconism of the South, the British calm of some people in Valparaiso, the quick speech of the North and their liking for simple, abundant food

The beauty of woman, the slanted olive eyes, the thick mane of hair, the sensuality, the angular face

 

 

Long before the feminist explosion in North America, a flower of ambiguous petals, many ladies in Santiago were separated or had their marriages annulled

Like burlap protecting incipient sunflowers against the onslaught of the sun, the ice and the frost, safeguarding the growth of children later sent out into the world to carry out the diverse tasks of men

Justicia Espada was the first female doctor in Chile. Magaly Honorato, the first woman to be tortured and killed in jail at the beginning of the seventies

Innumerable metis women with enormous eyes and ample bosoms trace their lineage from the Araucanians, from the angular profile of Ines de Suaréz, from the myth of La Quintrala, red–haired and shrouded in fog

Violeta  Parra flies up singing, entangling several other matriarchal figures as she takes flight. The young Gabriela Mistral watches her passing over a stone wall in the Norte Chico as she walks towards the State school in a white pinafore, her hair tied up in braids

The historical events stain with blood the bosoms of corpulent women, providers for huge families who grow up hanging onto their skirts with small hands like those painted by Pedro Lobos and dark eyes looking up in wonder

Señora Marta is the center of power and social life in Coipué, the Maule River region, together with her children of pure Spanish lineage preserved in this botanical garden of boldo and hawthorn, with a working husband you don’t even notice

She brings together singers and overseers in her adobe house of inscrutable depths, distant ceilings and tiny windows

Nilda Silva, may she rest in peace, works as a water carrier at age seven. Registers herself in the school run by the priests, sees the ocean for the first time in Tal Tal, throws herself face down on the floor trembling with wonder

Raises fifteen children and others she takes in. Cares for a fallen angel of a husband who dreams and mumbles about lost treasures, who develops a form of sculpture like a scrap-iron filigree

Protects her daughters against prostitution with the Bible and the rod. Dies blessing her enemies.  The hills of Coquimbo dressed in mourning

Nana Arcaya leaves the mansion, stops attending high society dances, and hangs up her ballet slippers at age twenty after the dictator Ibáñez banishes her father, the colonel, to the Juan Fernandez Islands

She works for decades and raises two children who cannot obliterate the nostalgia

But before that, the machis, possessed, twist convulsively, as through magic they keep themselves suspended on the top of the cinnamon tree, uniting that race of broad face and strong torso and high-pitched bird-like voice, with the sky, the Earth, the sun and the mountains

Crossing the Cordillera are the Collela Ché, multicoloured birds that keep their queen, a girl of seven, afloat in the air

 

Then the lethargic conquistadors, forced out of opulent Peru by internal strife among leaders, bearded, in rags, harquebuses rusty, are scattering towards the South in the grip of a weary greediness

Their inner eyes caressing the legends of the City of the Césares and the bodies of the Indian maidens as they spill out towards the Central Valley and the far South

As their concubines cook for them in improvised ovens and dry out the powder wet from the last rain and they gamble away at dice the four corners of the world

They have been spreading their seed wherever they set up camp, leaving behind children with sensitive, perplexed eyes

The skies of the South shake in turbulence as they advance through bogs and forests, those four-legged machines whose upper part is made of metal and spits fire

For some Emissaries of God the region is the lower vertex of a triangle, one point sunk in the chest of the divinity, the other in the Crown of Spain

Later they will make an inventory of the voices of the despised language while discussing theology in an atmosphere that smells of horse dung

Four hundred thousand conquistadors lie buried, fertilizing the region called La Frontera

In the final years of the nineteen century General Bulnes launches a campaign to root out the Araucanians. The border is crossed. Those older than eight are put to the knife

Since long before, Caupolicán carried an enormous log on his back for two days and two nights. Now the children of the Araucanians load sacks of flour in the bakeries

Lautaro did intelligence work, learned military techniques, incorporated the Spanish horse into battle

After having his hands amputated, Galvarino fought with the stumps

Like a field sown with brown grain razed by a fire that cannot burn its roots, these people sit waiting on the steps of the Government Building

Five hundred years isn’t that long for people who measure time in seasons and natural catastrophes

The Indians wander among their dwellings on the humid fertile ground of Arauco, taking care of flocks of hens that lay blue or greenish eggs, eating flour with water, raising children with high-pitched voices who talk with birds and one fine day migrate to the cities to look for work

Small, well-formed hands and feet, strong torsos, eyes big and brown, prominent chests and singsong voices, an aptitude for silver work and the indisputable role of women in religious and social life

A poor metabolism of wine

They sink their feet firmly in the humid grass of the South. The official accounts downplay the size of the indigenous population. They prepare themselves to wait  another couple of centuries at best

Translated from the Spanish for Jorge Etcheverry, edited by Sharon Khan.