by Sergio Chejfec, Andrea Cote, Reinaldo Laddaga, Daniel Link and Ernesto Livón Grosman

translated by Carmen García

We asked five long-time readers of Carrera’s poems to gloss verses from his work. Their comments follow, translated from the Spanish by Carmen García.

by Sergio Chejfec

“We don’t break the same treasure chest twice”

This verse is definitive of Potlach. It links with the previous verse, “We don’t tell the same dream twice”. One can summarize Arturo Carrera by declaring that, even while we repeat actions, we never quite do, or experience, the same thing twice. Both verses say something long recognized, both by Zen monks and laymen alike: you can’t step in the same river twice. But they must maintain the importance that so often the repetition of an idea denies: we never really can say the same thing twice.

Carrera’s poetry is curious because of the value it gives to action. Between the coldly explanatory and the overly dramatic, his verse strays far from the declarative, as if it were endowing language with a different power. Actions repeat themselves, never appearing only once. What’s more, they are made to repeat themselves, to waver between the distinct and the indistinct. They come to fruition by realizing, as if they were the steps of a dance, that movements must return to themselves in order to properly communicate what must be said. Like that familiar music of nostalgia, of family and food, in Arturo y yo (“Arturo and I”), the Italians forever collide the twists and turns of themselves on their dinner plates.

by Andrea Cote

Driven insane
with our pursuit
We are made to withstand death’s whims,
even from our infancies:
even so,
don’t you finish, don’t you ever end,
not now,
not ever.

Just like the whims that create movement and begin a poem, our infancy isn’t a paradise. But it’s not quite a hell, either. It’s that sudden, poisonous occurrence. It awakens us, like shock, but its effects don’t last as long. It precedes the endless things that are untouchable by time. It is a word without borders, it is Arturito, that typist of speed, the one who doesn’t carry himself and yet seizes me, the one burning with delirium. I search for the Gato de Tomás, the furious impulse of Luciana and all the furthest, natural, philosophies—
and all of our star-filled,
cosmic footprints:
our children.

by Reinaldo Laddaga

My very first reading of Arturo Carrera is inseparable from a prior, almost simultaneous reading—that of Severo Sarduy. I meet Carrera (and began to read his books) at a very particular moment: when La partera canta (“The Midwife’s Canto”) was just published with an attachment of Sarduy’s that quite blatantly recommended the collection for anyone familiar with the work of the Cuban poet. It praised the limitless space, celestial machines and robotic puppets of La partera canta (how Carrera conveyed, I remember, the creatures of Cobra). In those days, we called it “neo-baroque”: texts that expressed themselves like this, that created life in a virtual space: onscreen, or even better—on canvas, but a canvas of plastic and cellophane, a canvas that repels paint. Carrera’s poetry blooms in tunnels.

Just after I had met him (or even read his books) Arturo sent me a new poem: “Un dia en la esperanza” (“A Day of Hope”). It was then the first poem from Arturo y yo. What is this?, I asked myself. Short lines, sharp names, references to the quintessential sparse Argentine landscape that I could remember: in other words, everything contrary to what I knew to be Carrera. Or no? Was this even the same writer? Puzzled, I began to read the work as a link between his two worlds. The Carrera that initially presented impossible labyrinths now spurt forth with poems practically filled with novelistic familiarity—or, I realize now, its wreckage. This connection, this space between two ways of being (if only two), has always been, for me, a mystery: deciphering it has always been a driving force in my work.

Carrera’s Verse

by Daniel Link

There are verses that choose their own paths, their own carreras, simply because verse is the unit of the writing of poetry. But at times a verse imprints itself, unattached, in our consciousness. Arturo Carrera is one of the many poets that produce noteworthy verse, one we never cease to forget, but one that we don’t quite know how to locate in his own magnificent body of work.

Isn’t verse, as is said, I think, in La inocencia (citation from my memory), “the place where every word evades and loses itself”? Yes—verse (alone) is like an age-old voice that sings from the depths of time, a labyrinth of pure loss that survives in our memory like the sacred promise of a hymn. For this, it remains vivid in our minds.

Carrera’s verse is vibration, a jumble of indiscernible sensations. Beautiful and definite, it has the power to evoke the infantile memories behind a photograph, the “mother’s footsteps in family pictures”, the noise and the image, at the same time as their absence. Carrera knows full well—verse is the voice of ghosts.

Regarding a poem by Arturo Carrera—

by Ernesto Livón-Grosman

It wasn’t in Sicily, it wasn’t here.
from El vespertillo de las parcas (“Bats of Death”)

Carrera creates poems based on a few staple entities: children, animals, and rural landscapes. His text is constructed with layers and parallelisms, marked by a busy poetics that reveals a transversal cut though a geologic, natural setting. The infantile as animalistic is an oft-demeaned notion, and, as such, something that Carrera doesn’t only recover, but seeks to transform into a means for movement—or, more specifically, elevation—of the earthly reality of children and insects to the intangible material of death.

For Carrera and his readers, the campo and the lakes paint the Buenos Aires province as an ideal place for this other realm of daily life, the everyday and apparently insignificant reality through which one must pass in order to arrive at that other world, one that emanates the gentle light and muted sounds of children’s games. Above all, together with José Perdoni y Juan L. Ortíz, in this poem Carrera questions the expectations of what the truly poetic is. Is the intimacy of domesticity to the poet as his landscape is to the sublime?