Daniel Borzutsky. The Murmurring Grief of the Americas. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2024. 121 pages.

 



“Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else.”—Ursula Le Guin


        At a panel discussion at the 2024 American Literary Translators Association Conference (ALTA), Daniel Borzutsky described the impulse of writing poetry as if he were translating some unknown and invisible source text. This sentiment echoes Le Guin, who saw the same enigmatic and eerie quality in the process of writing as translating an unknown script. But what does it mean to read Borzutsky’s poems, written in a mixture of English and Spanish, as translations themselves? What is the source that he is translating from, and what slippages or arrivals are made in the process of translation from this ethereal source to the page?

This, I believe, is the murmuring noise that emanates from the book, the Borzutsky’s sixth poetry collection from poet and translator Daniel Borzutsky. A murmuring grief of the dead and the living. A murmuring of the specter within the writer and the voice that demands him to translate to the page, with an urgency that desires to be heard.

“We ask the murmurers what they want to do with themselves now that they don’t get to live anymore. They say they want to love all the things they could not love when they were alive. They ask us to carve our names in to the hills and they give us more love than we have ever known.” (115)

Taken from the series of prose poems at the end of the collection all entitled ‘The Murmuring Grief of the Americas’, we see the murmurs appear as communications from the dead. There is a spectral quality to many of the voices of the book and a disjointed distance Borzutsky creates as he asks us frankly to consider the injustices to people restricted from loving, from living in a state of imperialist Western civilization and mass capitalism. There is a resistive tone in the book that rails against the romanticized version of events and instead, speaks to the monotony and everydayness of suffering like the “the gentle hum of the authoritative machine.” The poems aim to give back names of the dead to the hills, reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s scene in his novel By Night in Chile where the dead are hypothetically commemorated in the hillside, with statues and what remains of their bodies. [1] For those lovers of Bolaño’s logic, Borzutsky presents strange and entangled poems that stay true to Bolaño’s voice and their occult source.

        There is a sense of mourning even within the word murmur. We can compare this to the noise of Raúl Zurita, an important figure for Borzutsky who has translated the Chilean poet extensively. In his collection of elegies for the dead entitled INRI, the Latin name inscribed above the statue of Jesus becomes the screech of pain out into the world, at the injustice of those disappeared under Pinochet’s regime in Chile [2]. Bortuzsky, who is American-born of Chilean heritage, can respond to the historic pain of the disappeared with the murmurs of grief and collective suffering, a calling back. There are also screams that move unrelenting in the polyphonic voices of the book:

“The screams that are screamed in the silence that can only be accessed
when it is understood that what must be documented what must be
narrated what must be evaluated what must be written is what can
never be documented narrated evaluated or written.” (25)

He tells us that his translation and poetry writing began at the same time, having translated the work of Chilean writers such as Raúl Zurita and Cecilia Vicuña, we get a sense of his interests in both the intersection of translation with the political, in the awareness of ecological disaster. But most important in the sense of making that inherently ties these writers’ work together. The front cover notably includes a drawing by Borzutsky, a hand-drawn organ-like map of the Americas. Pencil-drawn lines move out from the black masses of land as if pulsing. A fitting symbol for this thrumming, political book.

“The hospitals are exploding in the middle of the city and they tell us

The dead are not dead and the beach is disappearing

And the sand is disappearing and the lake and the dirty water and the
children are disappearing” 
—Day #1101 (10)

Borzutsky constructs a world of absolutes only to undercut them with the accumulation of confused facts from the state. The titles of the poems are numbered days creating the sense of a diary, a perpetual logging of his experience of time, warped by the decaying of the natural world with ecological disaster and the rise of ‘blankness of the bureaucracy’. Dark irony infiltrates these poems, making fun of the systems that oppress us not just through their withholding of information but also through the control of technology on our lives: “in order to mourn the bodies we love / The question is submitted through an encrypted browser.” (10) The system responds without feeling or understanding “thank you for your question we will contact you as soon as / we locate an authoritative body / who has been granted permission to speak.’ (11) Borzutsky makes plain the anguish and frustration at the inadequacy and brutality of operating systems in response to human suffering. A new regime. He encapsulates the impossibility of capitalism to generate anything but destruction in the poem “A Devouring Economy of Nature,” the face can become “privatized,” “little by little the bodies” are “repossessed,” “restructured” (29). They are all too aware of the physicality of corruption and capitalism on the body of the most vulnerable people, who own nothing, not even their own flesh.


        Strikingly, murmuring actually begins in the epigraph of the collection as Borzutsky pays homage to poets who have influenced him, whose voices linger in the in-between liminal spaces of the book. He starts the collection with quotes from both Clarice Lispector and Emily Dickinson that occur in tandem to each other and repeat.

“I shall miss myself so much when I die

            Clarice Lispector

I shall miss myself so much when I die

            Clarice Lispector

I shall miss myself so much when I die

            Clarice Lispector

I shall miss myself so much when I die

            Clarice Lispector”

At a recent reading at Notre Dame University he described how this line has lived with him for many years. He wanted them not to be mere epigraphs but to be read on a textual level, interacting with his poems directly. Indeed the idea of repetition, and what I would argue as reiteration, is inherently important to this book.

        Reiteration in the sense of a diverse landscapes of possible terrors and griefs that the speaker accumulates in the collection. They become like layers of paint on the walls, adding new harmonies of discomfort with each line. The reiterations are also part of a political call, a recognition of the lostness if not absence of minority voices in the face of oppression, so easily killed, tortured without repercussion or justice by arbitrary state-violence. Borzutsky is signaling the pointlessness of collective voices going unheard, mumbled and distorted, never to be acknowledged even after death.

“there are children crossing the river               some floor on cardboard and some

hold on to each other and some sing we are alive           there are neon lights

above the river the camera crews stand on the banks and film the river

in the right light           they film the floating children in the right light            they

film the sky turning purple and pink as fluffy pollen dissolves in the

warm air” (3)

In the first poem of the collection also titled “The Murmuring Grief of the Americas,” we see the group of children floating along on a piece of cardboard on a river, who we find out later are being chased by “patriots” who shoot one of the children in the leg, hunting them down. The scene of violence takes place, documented as matter of fact. This poem is engaged like the rest of the collection with the idea of performative humanitarian action. The collection reminds us we should be horrified not only by the suffering of children, like refugees who float precariously on the sea in search of safety, but the voyeuristic nature of the media and art-makers to document their suffering without intervention. An appropriation and extraction of suffering for personal and financial gain. He goes further and implicates these people in the courting of danger and exploitation of the children:

“don’t die        the director says to the children           if you die we won’t be able

to make this film and if we don't make this film there will be no evidence

that once you were alive and if there is no evidence that once you were

alive     then no one will know that we loved you” (3)

Borzutsky is masterful in creating the final blow. The introduction of the word love as a kind of sick emotion plagued with the sinister motivations of these filmmakers to witness and document the scene.

“because when I die again I will become the river

that runs between myself and myself” (4)

This doubling between myself and myself is seen throughout the collection. Like the map on the cover of the book there are tributaries exploding from the source, as the divisions of territory and land runs through the psyche of communities, spilt apart and dispersed like ‘fluffy pollen’ dissolving in warm air. We mostly are held at arm’s length by the speaker as they list the arbitrary atrocities of the world ticking onwards with cynical irreverence. Only in small moments do we get a glimpse of the personal and private terror, appearing through the ghost of Lispector: “I will miss myself so much when I die will you miss yourself so much / when you die will you miss me.” (35)

This collection is not for the fainthearted, it prepares us only for the continuation of absurdity and monotony of political violence and oppression. It asks “when will we be human again” without having a hopeful answer. I recommend for readers not to shy away from the murmuring of the dead, instead to embrace the confusion and systematic yearning of this spectral book: to read it, listen to it, summon a call back.





Notes

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[1] Bolaño, Roberto, translated by Chris Andrews. By Night in Chile. New York: New Directions, 2003.

[2] Zurita, Raúl, translated by William Rowe. INRI. New York: New York Review Books, 2018.