He would attend the Art Institute of Chicago and has lived in that city from 1998 to the present.
His literary influences are too expansive to be restricted to a Chilean matrix. It is most accurate to say that Borzutzky expands upon diverse possibilities that became visible and available to him as the child of Chilean migrants, and that his creative expression emerges from a great deal of work and thought. Peggy Levitt explains that examinations of second-generation cultural transnationalism are valuable, challenging past dismissals of transnational identity as “inauthentic” and insignificant:
When children grow up in households and participate in organisations in which people, goods, money, ideas and practices from their parents’ countries of origin circulate in and out on a regular basis, they are not only socialised into the rules and institutions of the countries where they live, but also into those of the countries from whence their families come. They acquire social contacts and skills that are useful in both settings. They master several cultural repertoires that they can selectively deploy in response to the opportunities and challenges they face.32
Borzutzky, has deployed his options in selective ways to build a mature poetics and contribute transnational results felt not only in the United States, but by writers in Chile. His work as a translator has a material impact on the circulation of texts by writers at the other end of the continuum, among them Zurita, Jaime Luis Huenún, Juan Emar, and Ghigliotto.33 Literary translation can result in new opportunities, such as international publication, republication of the original, or invitations for authors to travel and present their work (these results happening mostly in the cases of Zurita and Ghigliotto to date).
Borzutzky did not specialize in Latin American studies as a graduate student, but his work in education gave him opportunities to do advanced coursework in Latin American and US Latinx studies as an adult in Chicago, and his appointments at a Hispanic-serving institution have inspired broader formal and informal reflections on Latinidad. Chicago, famous as a site of intersection between diverse Latinx communities in the twentieth century, has large historical communities of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. Borzutzky’s awareness of the power of stereotypical media imagery, such as the cartoon Speedy Gonzales referenced in his poem “The Performance of Becoming Human,” has unfolded out of long-term reflections on the gaps between distorted mass-media images and histories of extreme underrepresentation. This combination of forces allows stereotypes to loom large in US popular culture despite sustained Latinx activism.34
Whereas stereotypes require confrontation and redress, complex identities present another sort of conceptual challenge. Borzutzky has remarked that a friend in Chile dubbed him a “falso-Chileno,” or false Chilean—a categorization of inauthenticity that stayed in his mind.35 Like many transnational subjects of his generation, he does not speak of any strategy to claim insiderdom by settling in Chile. However, in 2005 an unprecedented option emerged for Chilean Americans when Chile made dual citizenship possible. This political innovation established a new continuum, a relation unsettling the either/or boundaries that had previously rendered Borzutzky merely “falso” and were presumed to dictate not only national identity, but social identifications.
Dual citizenship potentially lends some imprimatur of authority to the public expression of bifocal identities. Bifocality constitutes an ambiguous relation in which a person may partake of more than one national experience, be that in terms of formal relationships to nation-states or informally, “in the absence of the state,” the zone into which transnational cultural expressions fall.36 A Chilean consul in Chicago suggested that Borzutzky consider pursuing dual citizenship and also seeking it for his son.37 He had not done so as of 2018 because transnational citizenship presents many complications—yet the prospect of dual status signifies in and of itself. Their conversation raised the possibility of a future variant on transnational relations, one that could redirect Borzutzky’s cultural memories and his experience of visiting Chile many times with family members, but which would not rely on an impossible relation to Chile because it would recognize identity on a more complex continuum. That is, it would not require him to have the life experience of his first-generation parents, or of someone who never left territorial Chile.
Whatever the future holds, Borzutzky’s subject matter from 2007 forward asserts the existence of continua already. His insistent turns and returns tap Latin American culture, drawing from diasporic discourse that presents a “series of feedback loops of people, ideas, and experiences within the Americas.”38 Individual sentences can read as feedback loops: “The speculator and the terrorist rush out onto the stage. The speculator is dressed like Che Guevara. The terrorist is dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit. They hold hands and sing ‘Solidarity Forever’” (In the Murmurs 24). A loop similarly structures this enjambed entry from “Murmur 1” in Memories of My Overdevelopment:
which brings us back to
translation
which all too often is talked about
as merely a problem of aesthetics
and not as a problem of politics
economics or violence
not as a problem of how to expose
and translate
the eternal translation
of the hollow wretchedness of
the devouring economies
of the borderless horrors
of nations
Transnational feedback loops address local realities while spiraling outward into global conversations. The role of the “Chicago Boys” in the Chilean coup could be no better setup for Borzutzky’s explorations of neoliberalism as a continuum merging Chile into Chicago, explicitly noted in his poetics statement for this volume. His recourse to international writers cycles outward from this transnationally doubled ground zero, most notable in his incorporation of Marguerite Duras (France, b. French Indochina, 1914–1946), who is known for incisive explorations of war as well as an ability to suggest things left unsaid. Borzutzky joins a global literary conversation about the violence of humanity and the role of writing as witness, openly referencing Duras to begin the first text of In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy, where he explores an incrementally richer use of silences between the screams of writing.
The poem “Illinois,” reprinted here from the same collection, runs on transnational feedback loops. It opens with an epigraph, four lines from a song by Víctor Jara. Jara’s brief injunction to run from people who are coming to kill “you” matters in setting the tone for the poem that follows, and the quotation works in more than one way. Its lack of translation immediately signals to all readers that knowledge of Spanish signifies. For those initiated into Chilean history and aware of its permeation of the present, symbolic weight adheres to the Jara name alone. A Communist Party member who sang about injustice and the possibility of a more just future, Jara is one of the early and most famous victims of state violence. He was detained, tortured, and executed (extrajudicially) in Chile Stadium in 1973—shot more than forty times—following the coup that led to Pinochet’s seventeen-year occupation of power. The New Song music with which Jara was associated fell into official disfavor with the military government, so his name and lyrics conjure the suppression of an entire movement. One might imagine that Jara’s case would have gone to court by the end of the century, since Pinochet left office in 1990. However, Jara’s case remained unresolved well into the period when Borzutzky was writing the books under discussion here. In 2014 and 2015, some military officers implicated in Jara’s death were charged, while prosecutors tried to extradite an army lieutenant from the United States for his central role. It didn’t work, and in 2015 the Jara family brought a suit against him in the United States. In sum, Jara’s lifespan was of the past, but due to a lack of formal resolution, he continued to be of the Chilean present in the early twenty-first century.
The long absence of justice around Jara signals a wider state of affairs. Despite considerable energy dedicated to
justice for victims inside and outside its territory, Chile continues to be hampered by “guardian structures” implemented in order to restrict democracy and weight governmental structures to the right of the political spectrum. In his poetic nod to the songwriter, Borzutzky draws from a culture aware that “the ongoing judicial case of Víctor Jara symbolizes the long struggle against impunity in Chile.”39
Dispensing with conventional punctuation in the remainder of “Illinois,” Borzutzky dramatizes the rhetoric of neoliberal privatization, one of the principal trajectories connecting Chile and Chicago: “and the bills are life or they are evaporating / and they throw fresh bills at us when we speak or they beat us and take away our bodies / it is private, mystical money.” Privatization permeates the landscape through debates around water, prompting anxiety about a future in which this elemental component of existence can be owned: “it is water we want and not juice / but who owns the water.” Like contemporary Latinx poets of other backgrounds, Borzutzky displays “a place-based poetics that has arisen concurrently with, and often in direct response to, neoliberal upheavals.”40 His poems further express doubt about writing’s implication in violence, imaging a future that can only be anxiogenic: a warning indeed.
In their very enunciations, Borzutzky’s poems suggest a thread of resistance. “Dystopian resistance holds no space of its own,” writes Rob Mc-Alear, “but stages its resistance within the system” by demonstrating that systems are not resolved and closed spaces.41 Borzutzky’s poetry asks the reader if this is so. Where systemic violence closes in, perverting even the motions of literature in good Bolaño fashion, the uncontainable imagination focalizing each scene moves. Paul Cunningham asserts that a reader can feel its energy as a vague “something”: “Borzutzky’s layering and arranging of underworldly voices, figures, and language gives rise to something positively, ominously alive.”42 Resistance obtains temporarily, in acts of sequential, vital naming and visualization of one event-dilemma after another, as in these lines from Memories of My Overdevelopment:
because we do not know how to interpret the screams of others
we translate
because the broken bodies and the broken nations and the broken
institutions that are always breaking us cannot be understood
we translate
we howl and we shriek and we translate43
Under these circumstances the mode of translation, so often diminished or ignored in discussions of inter-genre writing and poetics, offers writers the most convincing form of solidarity.
NOTES
Author’s note: I am grateful to Nancy Gates-Madsen and Juliet Lynd for their remarks.
1. Nicanor Parra, After-Dinner Declarations, trans. Dave Oliphant (Austin, TX: Host Publications, 2008), 95.
2. Daniel Borzutzky, Arbitrary Tales (Spokane, WA: Triple Press, 2005).
3. Forrest Roth, “Permutated Pasts: An Interview with Daniel Borzutzky,” Artvoice 6.5 (February 1, 2007). Available online at artvoice.com.
4. Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016).
5. Daniel Borzutzky, The Book of Interfering Bodies (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2011). Hereafter cited parenthetically as Interfering Bodies.
6. Andy Fitch, “Andy Fitch with Daniel Borzutzky,” Conversant (August 2015). Available online at theconversant.org.
7. Lisa Sewell, “Introduction,” in American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, ed. Claudia Rankine and Lisa Sewell (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007), 4.
8. Thomas Wright and Rody Oñate, Flight from Chile: Voices of Exile (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), 91.
9. Alejandra Serpente, “Diasporic Constellations: The Chilean Exile Diaspora Space as a Multidirectional Landscape of Memory,” Memory Studies 8.1 (2015): 56.
10. Daniel Borzutzky, In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (New York: Nightboat Books, 2015).
11. Joan Simalchik, “The Material Culture of Chilean Exile: A Transnational Dialogue,” Refuge 23.2 (2006): 95.
12. Wright and Oñate, Flight from Chile, 8.
13. For more discussion of these intersecting projects, which exceed the scope of my article, see Clara Han, Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
14. Han, Life in Debt, 4.
15. Borzutzky, In the Murmurs, 145.
16. Patrick William Kelly, “The 1973 Chilean Coup and the Origins of Transnational Human Rights Activism,” Journal of Global History 8 (2013): 166.
17. Ibid., 167.
18. Serpente, “Diasporic Constellations,” 50.
19. Craig Santos Perez, “Talking with Daniel Borzutzky,” Jacket 2 (2011). Available online at jacket2.org.
20. Borzutzky’s translations of Zurita are Song for His Disappeared Love (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2010) and The Country of Planks (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2015).
21. Daniel Borzutzky, “Daniel Borzutzky by Kristin Dykstra,” part II, Bomb, August 18, 2011. Available online at bombmagazine.org.
22. Galo Ghigliotto, Valdivia, trans. Daniel Borzutzky (Bloomington, IL: co·im·press, 2016). With this translation, Borzutzky won the National Translation Award conferred by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) in 2017.
23. Herencia includes two poems from Emma Sepúlveda, born in Argentina and raised in Chile, in its “Contemporary Exiles” section.
24. Ariel Dorfman, Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (New York: Penguin, 1998), 15–16.
25. Sophia McClennen, “Torture and Truth in Ariel Dorfman’s La muerte y la doncella,” Revista Hispánica Moderna 62.2 (2009): 180.
26. McClennen, “Torture and Truth,” 181.
27. Conversation with the author, December 26, 2015.
28. Daniel Borzutzky, Memories of My Overdevelopment (Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2015), 40.
29. Ibid.
30. Conversation between Borzutzky and the author, after his talk that became Memories of My Overdevelopment, at the national meeting of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), February 5, 2011.
31. Daniel Borzutzky, “Introduction,” in Cecilia Vicuna: The Selected Poems (1966–2015), ed. Rosa Alcalá (New York: Kelsey Street Press, 2016).
32. Peggy Levitt, “Roots and Routes: Understanding the Lives of the Second Generation Transnationally,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35.7 (2009): 1226.
33. See Daniel Borzutzky’s translation of Jaime Luis Huenún, Port Trakl (Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2007).
34. Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human, 14–19. For a video of Borzutzky pairing the text with cartoon clips, see “Reading by Daniel Borzutzky,” University of Chicago, Division of the Humanities, January 29, 2015. Available online at www.youtube.com.
35. Daniel Borzutzky, “Are We Latino: Memories of My Overdevelopment,” Entropy, September 29, 2014. Available online at entropymag.org.
36. Jorge Duany, Blurred Borders: Transnational Migration between the Hispanic Caribbean and the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 1–2, 21.
37. Borzutzky recounts this meeting in Memories of My Overdevelopment, in which the consul expresses confusion regarding his insufficiently Hispanic surnames: “He inquired about my last name—Borzutzky—and my mother’s maiden name, Talesnik, and he said: ‘no tienes algunos Gonzalez or Rodriguez en tu familia’ (aren’t there any Gonzalezes or Rodriguezes in your family)? The Chilean consul apparently had never heard of a Chilean Jew and this was his way of telling me I was inauthentic” (37).
38. Kelly, “The 1973 Chilean Coup,” 168.
39. J. Patrice McSherry, “The Víctor Jara Case and the Long Struggle against Impunity in Chile,” Social Justice 41.3 (2014): 52–53.
40. Michael Dowdy, Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013), 5. More recently, Borzutzky exp
anded on the topics of neoliberalism and violence in an essay useful for those pursuing the themes across his work. He links his own reflections into a short discussion of poems by others who also depict violence: Valerie Martínez, Juan Felipe Herrera, and María Rivera (trans. Jen Hofer and Román Luján). See “What the Neoliberal Policy Labs Eat and Shit,” American Poetry Review (January/February 2017): 17–18.
41. Rob McAlear, “The Value of Fear: Toward a Rhetorical Model of Dystopia,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 27.2 (2010): 37.
42. Paul Cunningham, “Review: Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016),” Diagram 16.6: n.p. Available online at thediagram.com.
43. Borzutzky, “translation and the continuum of decomposition,” in Memories of My Overdevelopment, 18.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Daniel Borzutzky
BOOKS
Arbitrary Tales. Spokane, WA: Triple Press, 2005.
The Ecstasy of Capitulation. Kenmore, NY: BlazeVOX, 2007.
The Book of Interfering Bodies. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2011.
In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy. New York: Nightboat Books, 2015.
The Performance of Becoming Human. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016.
Lake Michigan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.
CHAPBOOKS
Failure in the Imagination. Milwaukee, WI: Bronze Skull, 2007.
Data Bodies. Chicago: Holon Press, 2013.
Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! Lambertville, NJ: Bloof Books, 2014.
Memories of My Overdevelopment. Chicago: Kenning Editions, 2015.
TRANSLATIONS
Port Trakl. By Jaime Luis Huenún. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2007.
Song for His Disappeared Love. By Rául Zurita. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2010.
The Country of Planks. By Rául Zurita. Notre Dame, IN: Action Books, 2015.
American Poets in the 21st Century Page 16