In 1973, a sham presidency was engineered behind a military magic top hat donned by Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte in Chile. And in 1980, that big wand sham became an ersatz constitution. Ironically, in September of 2022, 62% of Chilean voters rejected the adoption of a new, more progressive constitution, which left intact the fraudulent 1980 constitution—a counterfeit document that has been a brick wall obstructing any kind of reform since its inception.

 From 1980 to 1999, the enigmatic Chilean poet, Ennio Moltedo, continued in a rather prolific silence to work on poems while enduring a life under the Chilean dictatorship and refusing to publish any of them. And for the first time in English, we have a collection of Moltedo’s poetry—La Noche, or, Night, which appeared in translation from World Poetry Books in 2022.

Moltedo’s poetry has long been an insider’s poetry—one that poets have loved, and in the lineage of long political poems. There’s Raúl Zurita’s trilogy (Anteparaíso, La Vida Nueva, and Purgatorio) as well as INRI, Neruda’s work right before his death, Tomás Harris’s Cipango, Juan Luis Martinez’s La nueva novela. One could even consider Nicanor Parra’s Antipoemas to be rather coded thematic language and anti-Pinochet, among  a much longer list. But now Ennio Moltedo’s Night, newly translated into English by Marguerite Feitlowitz, adds a new direction to this tradition for an English-speaking audience.

To open the book, Moltedo’s speaker says that we should “Look to the law.” But that law is deliberately undefined. Is it natural law, physical law, politically driven and sanctioned law, or constitutional? And, if so, what are its forms? Moltedo details law’s forms throughout Night. One prime example of this law-detailing both in natural state and political state shows up in “Poem 46,” in which Moltedo turns the horizon’s end and brings things back to the ground:

This portal to the sky, washed by the wind, these peaks are more colorful, clean, and whole than any “city center” of smoke clouds, crates, and a new form of congress—piles of bones the whole length of the beach, yellowing under the sun, the architecture of some prehistoric beast.

Natural law in Chile has always been a central factor in its politics. When conquistadors and early imperial arms struggled to cross the desert and ascend treacherous mountains, they pitted indigenous groups against one another to do their violent bidding for them. Chile’s vast and varied land, its prehistoric coastline and desert were, of course, not always Chilean. Moltedo’s work is situated where the historic and prehistoric clash. Atacama’s vastness, its sky and the beach-clad horizon inspires meaning that only a people whose political hope was crushed during a dictatorship can grasp.

In Patricio Guzmán’s documentary, Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light), the setting is the elevated Atacama in all its beauty, including the absolute absence of rain in certain parts of the desert. Professional astronomers scour the starry skies for answers to celestial mysteries; women down on the ground in the Atacama scour the sands for remains of their disappeared loved ones. The astronomer Gaspar Galaz, says off-camera, “The present is a fine line?” Galaz nods, “A puff of air would destroy it.” And it is this puff of air Moltedo chases and pins down and reforms and mangles and blows away like dandelion leaves only to catch it again in Night.

Documentary realism like Guzmán’s might help us understand Moltedo’s sentiments both expressed and repressed in Night. Consider that alongside Moltedo, writing in “Poem 3,” “Men walking to where men don’t exist.” And then, in “Poem 4”: “Never forget the photo.” There is a fermented, patient rage in Moltedo’s lines—the kind of gray garden that fascism carves into the cowering soul of an oppressed person.

Later, at the end of “Poem 8,” Moltedo’s speaker exclaims: “Isn’t there one damn soul around here who understands the / meaning of all this?” Connecting his speaker to Diogenes is one way, even in mockery, to both acknowledge silence as a lack of honesty while using an objective device as a torch, something to find the murdered and disappeared. It’s this question that reveals his rage and, moreover, acknowledges that these lowest standards for social life as set by the fascist state cannot be met. Where are you, honest one, and are you lying to yourself just like the rest of us?

“Poem 12” appears simple, concise, in three sentences:

They have sent me to the bottom of the sea. Without oxy-

gen, of course. In street clothes, with blue envelope in hand.

Moltedo’s life growing up along the coast, meandering the streets of Viña del Mar on foot, was one spent beside the ocean, a horizon with layers of native meaning. He claimed he was not an avid swimmer and preferred observation from a distance, keeping to himself, and was not overly desirous of recognition or publication. But in that twelfth poem, with its allusions to both censorship and state-sanctioned disappearance at a whim, the blue object feels powerful, a sealed envelope that might decry something or hold a potentially dangerous message. Yet its message closed, not presented. It is its mere potential that has the speaker sent to the bottom of the sea, like the thousands of Chileans disappeared during Pinochet’s rule.

It is impossible to ignore “Poem 12’’’s form—the prose block—that acts also as a visual cue. It looks neat, organized, bureaucratic, carries the tradition of the city from Baudelaire, etc., and implies a lack of experimentation but is syntactically balletic. There translation’s register is sonically attuned to the original clauses themselves, and, in addition, many of the resonant instances are preserved in both the Spanish and the English. What is most striking to me is how in Night when something appears in prose, it appears systematic and traditional. Breath is braced by punctuation as opposed to sustained by fragmentation. Breath in these sentences is controlled, tight, not allowed any ecstasy—not dissimilar to a daily life of intermittent lockdowns and curfews. 

Much later in the book—“Poem 34”—we find one of the best (yes, arguably!) prose poems the English language has ever seen. It goes as such:

Come on, if they’re real criminals, there’s no other word:

death.

You could unpack the cogent urgency in “Come on,” and the restive frustration in “there’s no other word” but it’s really the weight of the term “real” that has to simultaneously contract and expand in acknowledgement of the blood-soaked rule of Pinochet. But, the heaviness of landing “death” on its own line, its sole position in a single list—that Pinochet committed atrocities, and for so doing deserved to die two times over. We go ga-ga over Pound’s wet, black boughs but this little piece in the midst of 113 prose poems just seems to say it all about the horrors of modern life with a much more deceptively and meaningfully sharp blade.

I’ll return here to Moltedo’s initial imperative in his opening poem: “Look to the law.” He frequently uses the concept of “horizon,” almost as if he wants to say that legal laws are physically unlocatable—even in a constitution, or in a book on a shelf. The law is never a truly visible or concrete thing, and it is the things that ascend the horizon—the clouds—that draw his attention. For Chile, the abstract and the natural—its long, silent coast and its horizon—is simultaneously a border, the country’s most visible entry and exit point. Helicopters would famously fly out past the coast and drop bodies out of their open doors. 800 people (including poet Raúl Zurita) were crammed onto a ship that had a 190-person capacity just off the coast and tortured. For Moltedo, the coast and horizon were completely symbolically altered.

We can see how the combination of horizon and coastline are transformed in “Poem 40”:

Anniversaries at sea are seductive. [...] Because we’re drowning in anniversaries—relaunchings and rebirths—we have crossed the threshold that divided life from death and here we lie before the sea to once again navigate our own waters, the very image of unforgettable disasters.

Moltedo’s poems truly embody the Latin origins of the term “contextual”—con and texture—as he weaves a complex tapestry of symbolism and tenacity. When you look away from the law and into this work, you may sense his anger and tension, but also how clean appearances mask what’s underneath.

In order to make his film Acta General de Chile, Miguel Littin had to pretend to be a Uruguayan businessman (with a borrowed passport) and brought a film crew into Chile (after being exiled for 12 years) to capture this silent tension just beneath the surface of Chileans living under Pinochet. He claimed, “No one spoke, no one looked in any specific direction, no one gesticulated or smiled.” In a transgressive scene where Littin and his crew go to Pablo Neruda’s casa-turned-tourist-attraction on the Isla Negra, a shot pans to Neruda at work on a love poem for his wife Matilde, then moves upward to reveal an emotionless sculpture of Mary while continuing outside to a slightly dilapidated beachfront wooden gate system covered in carved statements, including one that the camera holds on that reads: Las ideas no se matan (Ideas cannot be killed). In writing, ideas have somewhere to hide or live, then.

Ennio Moltedo plays his speaker’s emotional spectrum with a thick and cynical sarcasm and deep sincerity. One near-surreal instance of the sarcastic occurs in “Poem 60”: “Dwarfs wearing suits and ties play the bailiffs in films about extraterrestrials.” That’s it. That’s the entire poem. How might we read this provocative sentence? Is it an allegory about power? And then there is the candidly solemn “Poem 92”:

And what shall we do with all the love accumulated in distant countries?

Return the ashes.

In “Poem 95,” Moltedo writes:

[...] while the sun goes down without any resistance and bathes in the sea, as though nothing else was happening.

It’s easy to imagine why Moltedo might read that the unkillable idea is hidden in the ways that nature moves despite human evil. Yet it seems pleasurably archetypal to bear witness to the sunset, its untouchable beauty.

The poems of Ennio Moltedo’s Night as they exist now in the present feel restorative, powerful. I’m reminded  again of something the astronomer Gaspar Galaz who appears in Nostalgia de la luz says during the film:  “I am convinced that memory has a gravitational force. It is constantly attracting us. Those who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moment. Those who have none don't live anywhere.” Moltedo seems to have harnessed that force both in his poetics and by way of his living, always having steered his emotional compass toward reforms that may not have taken place, but exist still in the horizon just beyond.