{"id":173122,"date":"2026-03-11T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-11T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=173122"},"modified":"2026-03-13T10:10:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T14:10:35","slug":"bolanos-heresy-on-distant-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/03\/11\/bolanos-heresy-on-distant-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Bola\u00f1o\u2019s Heresy: On Distant Star<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Kgbo, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Are there any actual poems in Distant Star<\/em>?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe three poems were short; all less than ten lines,\u201d Arturo B., our poet-narrator, says of the early verse of Alberto Ruiz-Tagle, the mysterious autodidact who one day appears, as if from nowhere, in the poetry workshop Arturo attends. \u201cOne described a landscape: trees, a dirt road, a house in the distance, wooden fences, hills, clouds.\u201d No part of the poem is quoted; we\u2019re given none of the text or texture. According to Marta, another young poet in their orbit, these weren\u2019t Ruiz-Tagle\u2019s \u201creal poems\u201d anyway; even the poems withheld from us are only stand-ins. Where, then, in Distant Star<\/em>, are the \u201creal poems\u201d? One fateful night soon after Pinochet seizes power, the Garmendia sisters\u2014\u201cidentical twins and the undisputed stars of the poetry workshop\u201d\u2014read their poems to Ruiz-Tagle (right before he\u2019s revealed to be the murderous aviator Carlos Wieder), but they don\u2019t read them to us; we\u2019re just told their poems are \u201cwonderful.\u201d They \u201coften described painters lost in the wilds of southern Chile, embarking on hopelessly ambitious works and hopelessly in love.\u201d (The poems we don\u2019t see are about impossible works of art.) Again and again, poems are characterized in a way that only makes them more opaque: \u201cthe opening lines were worthy of Isidore Isou, while the unexpected ending would not have been out of place in a Chilean folk song,\u201d or \u201ca narrative poem, which \u2026 reminded me of John Cage\u2019s poetic diary spliced with lines that sounded like Juli\u00e1n del Casal or Magallanes Moure translated into French by a Japanese psychotic,\u201d and so on.<\/p>\n

The only poems (assuming we agree that they are poems) that the narrator quotes directly are those quickly disintegrating lines that Wieder\u2014a member of Pinochet\u2019s air force\u2014writes with his plane across the sky. (Of course, type can only approximate vapor, so in a sense we\u2019re presented with translations.) And yet even these lines begin to waver, Bola\u00f1o erasing with one hand what he writes with the other. \u201cI managed to read the words DIXITQUE DEUS \u2026 FIAT LUX \u2026 ET FACTA EST LUX<\/small>,\u201d the narrator recalls, only to add, \u201cthough perhaps I was guessing or imagining or dreaming.\u201d The unforgettable scenes of Wieder\u2019s nihilistic skywriting possess a dreamlike indeterminacy, indeed; they seem to happen and not happen simultaneously: \u201cBut none of the generals or the generals\u2019 wives and children or the senior officers or the military, civil, ecclesiastical, and cultural authorities present could read his words.\u201d Is that because the words are projections, hallucinations? Even Wieder doesn\u2019t seem to know: \u201cHe wrote, or thought he wrote: DEATH IS MY HEART<\/small>.\u201d Here, where we are supposedly reading the writing on the skywall, the sentences march toward contradiction, self-cancellation: \u201cAnd then he had no smoke left to write with \u2026 but still he wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

What are we to make of the resemblance between the sky-writing of Carlos Wieder and the work of the real Chilean poet and artist Ra\u00fal Zurita? Zurita, who was born in Chile in 1950, and who was imprisoned and tortured by Pinochet, founded CADA (Colectivo Acciones de Arte), known for its artistic demonstrations against the dictatorship. In June of 1982, Zurita hired airplanes to skywrite excerpts from his poem \u201cLa\u00a0 vida nueva\u201d over Manhattan (lines that in their epigrammatic declarations recall some of Wieder\u2019s \u201cwriting<\/a>\u201d). Is Bola\u00f1o indicting Zurita\u2014suggesting, say, that when poetry becomes spectacle or political action it can easily be co-opted by the right? Does Distant Star<\/em> imply that the right-wing and left-wing avant-gardes are interchangeable, both harboring the fantasy of obliterating the boundary between art and life and intervening directly in history? (Wieder can also be read as literalizing the \u201caeropoesia\u201d of the Italian futurist Filippo Marinetti.) It is Wieder\u2019s goal to plan \u201csomething spectacular to show the world that the new regime and avant-garde art were not at odds, quite the contrary.\u201d Is Bola\u00f1o mocking Zurita\u2019s messianic streak, or just giving in to petty rivalry?<\/p>\n

Certainly, Distant Star<\/em> is marked by an ambivalence about the relation between radical politics and art. Poetry morphs into political violence (or violent resistance)\u2014and not just for the fascist Wieder. Juan Stein, the leader of the poetry workshop in which the narrator first meets Ruiz-Tagle\/Wieder, treasures a photograph of the Red Army general Ivan Chernyakhovsky, to whom he is related. (Bola\u00f1o\u2019s endless cascades of literary proper names, both historical and fabricated, here give way\u2014almost without transition\u2014to a litany of Soviet generals, as if literary and military history were interchangeable: \u201cAccording to Stein, [Chernyakhovsky] was the greatest general of the Second World War. Bibiano \u2026 mentioned Zhukov, Koniev, Rokossovsky, Vatutin, and Malinovsky, but Stein stood firm.\u201d) Stein often muses about getting rid of the general\u2019s photo, saying that he will instead \u201cuse the frame for a photo he had of William Carlos Williams doing his day job as a small-town doctor,\u201d which he claims would be more appropriate for a literature department. But even this fantasy about replacing a general with a poet involves a poet chosen because he was also a so-called man of action, had a real job\u2014a doctor carrying his \u201cblack leather bag\u201d full of medical instruments, not writing implements. (It\u2019s unclear, by the way, if the photo in fact depicts Williams\u2014the instability of authorship in Bola\u00f1o\u2019s work extends to author photos.) After the coup, Stein disappears, only to surface \u201clike a ghost wherever there was fighting, wherever desperate, generous, mad, courageous, despicable Latin Americans were destroying, rebuilding, and redestroying reality, in a final bid that was doomed to failure.\u201d A doomed effort to destroy, rebuild, redestroy reality: Is that Bola\u00f1o\u2019s definition of vanguard poetry or revolutionary politics or both? Does it involve any actual poems? For Stein and Wieder, art culminates in\u2014or collapses into\u2014violence, even if Stein is to be admired, Wieder feared and despised.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The poets, who may or may not write poems, disappear and reappear and disappear again, their names undergoing change, their identities never certain. (There are so many aliases and anagrammatic recombinations in Bola\u00f1o\u2019s global literary underworlds, both within and across his books, that all proper names\u2014even the historically verifiable ones\u2014feel like pseudonyms.) The poem glimpsed only in paraphrase, the poet always in the process of vanishing\u2014these are the central mysteries (both in the noirish and metaphysical senses) that animate Bola\u00f1o\u2019s fiction. His gift is for making the poem and poet seem at once ludicrous, impossible, and like the most important thing in the world, or like something from another world, a distant star.<\/p>\n

The literary critic Cleanth Brooks coined the phrase \u201cthe heresy of paraphrase\u201d to warn against reducing a poem to its content and context, as if you could capture the essence of a poem while discarding its form. Part of Bola\u00f1o\u2019s genius is the way he lets a species of heresy charge his prose. Bola\u00f1o\u2019s paraphrases are of course fictions, purportedly secondhand accounts of things that didn\u2019t exist in the first place, but through this fictional secondariness he smuggles in poetic effects. Here, for example, is Arturo B.\u2019s description of the legal testimony given by the Garmendia sisters\u2019 maid against Wieder when he\u2019s tried in absentia for his crimes. (Note that it\u2019s not only paraphrase, but translation, since \u201cevery second word was in Mapuche.\u201d) Her testimony became<\/p>\n

a cyclical, epic poem, which, as her dumbfounded listeners came to realize, was partly her story, the story of the Chilean citizen Amalia Maluenda, who used to work for the Garmendias, and partly the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror. When she spoke of Wieder, she seemed to be talking about several different people: an invader, a lover, a warrior, a demon. When she spoke of the Garmendia sisters, she likened them to the air, to garden plants, or puppies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We don\u2019t know if Amalia\u2019s analogies were a compelling part of her \u201cepic poem\u201d (\u201cpuppies\u201d doesn\u2019t sound particularly promising). We don\u2019t get the specific analogies; we just get the raw material of likening. But this has its own power, as we imagine a range of possibilities (unencumbered by any actuality), just as Amalia\u2019s speech about Wieder seems to describe several men at once, just as her story becomes several stories simultaneously. We are guessing, imagining, dreaming. My favorite passages in Bola\u00f1o\u2019s books are such heresies, in which distance\u2014translation, paraphrase, unreliability\u2014enables a kind of negative capability, a spread of potential (and potentially contradictory) meanings. And maybe this is my own dream or projection, but when I read Bola\u00f1o\u2019s flat, minimal descriptions of nonexistent verse, the prose begins to vibrate. \u201cTrees, a dirt road, a house in the distance, wooden fences, hills, clouds\u201d\u2014instead of seeming to come after a particular poem, I have the inkling that this language is not yet a poem, that it is waiting for you or me to build it, give it form. Paraphrase becomes a protopoem. Heresy\u2014if only for an instant\u2014gives way to faith in the prospect of poetic making.<\/p>\n

Arturo B., while paraphrasing Amalia\u2019s cyclical epic, glosses Distant Star<\/em> itself. For this book is partly the story of a Chilean citizen and partly the story of the Chilean nation, its political dreams and nightmares; it is a story of terror, a story about an inscrutable, chameleonic villain who might be a demon. And it is a story, like so many of Bola\u00f1o\u2019s stories, in which poetry is everywhere and poems are nowhere to be found.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From the introduction to Roberto Bola\u00f1o\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Distant Star<\/a>,\u00a0translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews, out from Picador in April.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Ben Lerner is the author of several books of poetry and prose, as well as collaborations with visual artists. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. His newest novel, <\/em>Transcription, will be released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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