Los Amantes/Lovers

A version of a poem by Julio Cortázar

Les amants/ Lovers (1928) by René Magritte. MoMA

As some of you may remember, I’m a fan of the Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar. I wrote a kind of tribute to one of his stories almost exactly a year ago.¹

Born in Brussels to Argentinian parents in 1914, Cortázar grew up in Buenos Aires, studied philosophy and literature, and worked for a time in a university before political problems under the dictatorship forced him to leave his university post. He then worked as a translator of French and English for UNESCO.

From 1951 he went into exile. His translations, especially of Edgar Allan Poe, influenced his own work, and he also had a strong interest in surrealism (as well as politics). His work is usually seen as part of the so-called “Boom” in Latin American literature of the 1960s and 1970s.²

He is most known for his dazzling short stories and for Rayuela ("Hopscotch"), an innovative novel that can be read in multiple sequences, offering varied experiences and interpretations. Translations into English of some of his poems are available under the title Save Twilight: Selected Poems.

Cortázar died in 1984 in Paris, where he’d spent much of his life after leaving Argentina.

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As I mentioned in my post last year, Cortázar has the ability to make the truly bizarre seem normal and even mundane. He can also do the opposite—transform the quotidian world into something extraordinary.

In the poem Los Amantes, I think he does a bit of both, with elements of surrealism included. You can read his poem here.³

In Imagen de John Keats, published posthumously in 1996, Cortázar wrote with typical verve:

Translators know that a despondency of ash and dirty hands awaits them at dawn, how translating is similar to loving, how the small fragmentary triumphs do not make up for the scale of the defeat.

What follows is a version of Cortázar’s poem.⁴ Whether my effort qualifies as poetry, I will leave to you to decide.

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Lovers

Who sees them walk through the city

if everyone is blind?

They take each other’s hand. Something speaks

between their fingers, sweet tongues

licking damp palms, running over their finger bones,

while above them blinks the eye-filled night.⁵

They are lovers, their island set adrift

towards deaths of grass, towards ports

that open between the sheets.

Everything is thrown out of order through them,

everything finds its lost number;

but they don’t even see

that while they roll around on their bitter sand

there is a pause in the work of nothingness,

that the tiger is a garden at play.⁶

Dawn breaks with the garbage trucks,

the blind begin to venture out,

the Ministry opens its doors.

The exhausted lovers look at each other and touch

once more before scenting the day.

Now they’re dressed and walking in the street

and it is only then,

when they are dead, when they are dressed,

that the hypocritical city takes them back

and assigns their everyday duties.

1. I guess this is another tribute to him as writer—and as translator. I recall that when I took my translator’s exams from the Institute of Linguists (UK) many years ago, I was both excited and a little uneasy when I turned over the exam paper to find that one of the passages I had to translate was from a story by Cortázar—he’s not the easiest writer to translate. Happily, I passed.

2. https://humanidades.com/boom-latinoamericano/ (in Spanish)

3. In Spanish. I haven’t been able to determine the date when the poem was written.

4. I believe this version has been produced in accordance with Fair Use guidelines.

5. The original does not mention “blinking.” This is not my only departure from the original.

6. This surreal line reminds me of his story Bestiario (1951), in which a tiger roams a garden in a large country estate and whose presence is not explained or particularly remarked upon.