Douglas Adams

En contadas ocasiones acabo yendo a donde pretendía ir, pero a menudo termino en algún sitio al que era preciso que fuera.

Ana Cecilia Prenz Kopuša / La lengua (fragmento de su novela "Cruzando el río en bicicleta")

A mi hijo el profesor argentino de violín le dice:

- Tu papá es esloveno y tu mamá ¿de dónde es?
- Es argentina pero nació en Belgrado.
- Ah ¿es serbia?
- No, es argentina.
- No, es serbia, Si vos naciste en Italia, sos italiano, Yo nací en Argentina, soy argentino, por lo tanto, tu mamá, si nació en Serbia, es serbia.

Felipe se queda mudo y piensa. No comprende el razonamiento. Desde que nació su madre para él es argentina.

- ¿Y qué lengua habla tu papá?
- Esloveno.
- ¿Y tu mamá?
- Español. Pero nosotros en casa hablamos muchas lenguas: yo con mi hermano hablo esloveno, con mi papá italiano, con mi mamá español y mi papá y mi mamá entre ellos hablan serbio. Y mi hermano con mi mamá español y con mi papá esloveno.
- Pero ¿tu mamá habla esloveno o serbio?
- Mi mamá habla serbio pero los eslovenos entienden a los serbios, y los serbios a los eslovenos.
- Ah, como nosotros con los peruanos.
Concluye el profesor.

Denise Levertov / O taste and see

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination's tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Old Man Leaves Party / Un viejo se va de la fiesta (R.I.P. Mark Strand, 1934-2014) / Ezequiel Zaidenwerg

Goodbye, Strand. This bizarre party will miss you // Chau, Mark. Esta fiesta rarísima te va a extrañar


Old Man Leaves Party

It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body.  The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection.  The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking.  I was like you once.  But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?

Un viejo se va de la fiesta

Cuando dejé la fiesta quedó claro
que si bien yo pasaba los ochenta, todavía tenía
un cuerpo hermoso. La luna relumbraba como acostumbra
en tiempos de introspección profunda. El viento contenía
el aliento. Y mirá, alguien dejó un espejo apoyado en un árbol.
Después de asegurarme de que estaba solo, me saqué la camisa.
Las flores de la yuca bajaron sus cabezas bañadas por la luna.
Yo me saqué los pantalones, y volaron en círculos
por sobre las secuoyas las urracas.
Allá abajo, en el valle, el río seguía su curso.
Qué raro estar en medio de la nada, yo solo con mi cuerpo.
Sé lo que estás pensando. Yo alguna vez fui como vos.
Pero ahora, que tengo ante mí tantas cosas, tantos árboles
de color esmeralda, estos campos blanqueados de maleza,
y montañas y lagos, ¿cómo no ser yo mismo y nada más,
este sueño de carne, de a un instante por vez?

Ovidio / Amores (fragmento)

Nitimur in vetitum Semper cupimusque negata; sic interdictis imminet aeger aquis.

(‘Nos lanzamos siempre hacia lo prohibido y deseamos lo que se nos niega; así el enfermo acecha las aguas prohibidas’).

John Cassavetes

La humanidad ha encontrado por fin el mínimo común denominador: El dinero. Es la más infame, la más baja, la más estúpida de las pequeñas excursiones a la soledad que jamás he visto. Hace siete u ocho años, allá por los 60, los jóvenes americanos comenzaron a rebelarse contra eso. Y luego, curiosamente, se ha vuelto a todo aquello y se ha comercializado y utilizado la revuelta como medio de hacer dinero. 'El mercado de los jóvenes'. Los periodistas me han preguntado: “¿Hacia dónde se inclina, hacia el mercado de los jóvenes?” ¡Pero veamos! ¿Por qué no? Se hacen filmes para los jóvenes porque son los únicos en tener emociones todavía. Es necesario formar parte de la juventud y hacer filmes para mantenerse joven. Pero yo no pienso en los jóvenes como un mercado. Pienso que la juventud es la vida. Y la vida son los hombres y las mujeres.

Alejandra Pizarnik / Diarios de juventud (fragmento)

...¡Amado Vallejo! ¡Mi adorado poeta triste! ¡Tú con tus huesos hambrientos y el pelo revuelto y la nuez anhelante y el torso partido y el sentir escabroso y la soledad y el sexo balbuceante y la soledad y el ojo vestido de gris y la soledad y el amado lloro de siempre y la soledad y los golpes fuertes de la vida y la soledad y yo no sé por qué de tanto daño de tanto golpe duro y malo de tanta soledad pendiente y la nada y horrendo y el mefistofélico bastón en quien no apoyarse y el bendito Dios que camina junto a ti y el terrible exilio de los eternos fugitivos, y las calientes lágrimas una más hasta la ecuación imposible y los dulces monos de Darwin agitando veinte dedos por cabeza y el tric- trac de los huesos pidiendo un trozo de pan en que sentarse y la soledad el llanto la angustia la nada y la soledad!!!! !!!! Amadísimo queridísimo César !!!! ¡¡Hasta cuando!! ¿¿Siempre?? Lloro.

Santiago Niño / Memoria Ancestral

Creo que echamos de menos a ese algo que hemos olvidado; a ese algo que dejamos en algún punto del tiempo y el espacio. Quizá esa sea la causa de toda la nostalgia inexplicable que nos aflige. Quizá de allí venga nuestro deseo incorregible de volar, de ser lo divino, lo inmortal. Quizá esa difusa memoria ancestral sea la culpable de que nos sintamos aislados y con ganas de volver a ese lugar que no sabemos qué es ni dónde está; a ese estado que ahora no conocemos pero intuimos que existe, o que existió, para nosotros y en nosotros, alguna vez. Quizá ese vertigonoso enigma que nos acecha con locura y que nos hace vulnerables a los golpes de la incertidumbre, sea un atisbo de la eternidad que nos evuleve y de la que hemos sido parte siempre, en millones de mundos, de cuerpos, de realidades.

Marco Zanger

Un grupo de científicos encierran gaviotas, currucas y otras aves en jaulas dentro de cuartos cerrados. Las dejan a oscuras donde no se ve el cielo. Estudian los mecanismos migratorios. Con la llegada de Octubre las aves se agitan, se lanzan contra las paredes, las envuelve el propio deseo. Las gaviotas son las primeras en morir al estrellar repetidas veces la cabeza contra los barrotes. Las currucas se detienen patas para arriba y tiemblan incesantes. Finalmente las matan las sombras.

Concluyen que la presencia del polo magnético se percibe en la sangre.

Sandino Bucio Dovalí

Hoy despiertan los muertos de su letargo de luces infinitas
Hoy vienen con sus alas de estrellas y sus ojos musicales
Hoy quieren volver a sentir la materia, convertirse en piedras
Hoy danzan con el humo del copal y queman sus pies en la madera
Los muertos viven en el sonido, en el lado mental de las auroras
Los muertos dejan sus huellas en el pensamiento
son murmullos, cicatrices que florecen en el cerebro
los muertos dejan una estela de códigos en el cielo...

Spomenik, The Monuments of Former Yugoslavia / Willem Jan Neutelings

In the rugged, mountainous regions of the former Yugoslavia, Spomeniks are everywhere. You’ll see them on strategic outcrops, lofty passes and sweeping plateaus: gigantic sculptures, firmly anchored to the rocks. They are objects of stunning beauty. Their abstract geometric shapes recall macro views of viruses, flower-petal goblets, crystals. They are built of indestructible materials like reinforced concrete, steel and granite. Some are solid, others hollow. The largest Spomeniks even afford access to the public, teetering on the boundary where sculpture becomes architecture. 

Hardly anyone outside of the former Yugoslavia is aware of their existence, and within the present ex-Yugoslavia, no one really wants to be reminded that they are there. Twenty years ago there were thousands of them, of every conceivable size, shape and description, but in the early 1990s the majority of them were destroyed, dismantled or in the best case, abandoned to the natural elements. Only those large and heavy enough to thwart vandals are still standing today, derelict and forsaken. Yet these objects were built just a single generation ago, in the 1960s and 70s, as memorials to the Second World War. Those who commissioned them have since passed away, but their architects and sculptors are still living. In the 1980s the monuments still attracted millions of visitors, but a decade later their appeal vanished. They have become submerged in a new age, rendered unintelligible to the current generation. Their symbolism has been lost in translation as the visual language has changed, their signals muffled by a shifted worldview. The monuments have been the objects of blind fury, and now of indifference. What remains is pure sculpture in a desolate landscape.

The Spomeniks’ background unfolds a strange story. Other monuments dating from the same period, such as the Atomium in Brussels, remain crowd pleasers. Comparable works of sculpture by Western artists of the same era are universally respected and warmly embraced by the public, having become part of the art historical canon. It is only very rarely that they fall victim to acts of blind destruction, as was the fate of monumental sculptures by Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet and Fritz Koenig, which had the misfortune to be located next to Al-Qaeda’s target in New York. Incidentally, Fritz Koenig has created memorials for the Maut-hausen concentration camp and for the Munich Olympic Massacre. It is one of history’s odd twists that it was in fact a non-memorial work of his, the eight-metre-high ‘Sphere’ from 1967, that was salvaged, heavily damaged, from the wreckage of the World Trade Centre and turned into the memorial for the victims of 9/11. It stands in Battery Park, in all its scarred glory, like a Spomenik in reverse.

It is understandable that statues of Stalin or Saddam, no matter how well they may have been crafted by their creators, have been pulled from their pedestals as icons of dictatorship. What is remarkable about these Spomeniks, however, is that they are completely abstract, devoid of the cult of personality often found in Eastern Europe. They are not busts of great leaders, they bear no symbols like stars or sickles, do not depict workers or farmers’ wives brought to life in muscular marble. The objects reveal an iconography of festive decorations: flowers, streamers, lanterns. Their stance is neutral, referring to nothing but themselves. They fit seamlessly into the Sixties-era aesthetics of Barbarella movies, Paco Rabanne dresses and Lava lamps. And yet, every single one of them is a memorial monument to the most atrocious events of the Second World War, marking the sites of bloody battles and sinister concentration camps. In multicultural Yugoslavia, however, the Second World War was a layered and ambiguous situation. Not only a war of liberation against the aggressor Nazi Germany, but also a civil war with complex oppositions between ethnic population groups who fought one another from different points on the ideological spectrum, such as the Partisans, the Ustaše and the Chetniks. For this reason, the war monuments could assume neither a heroic nor a patriotic guise. In other words, they had to be neutral enough to be acceptable to both victims and perpetrators. After all, once the slaughter was over, the former opponents had to collectively form the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia together. Hence the choice of a neutral, almost frivolous visual language, whereby the Spomeniks look more like sculptures in an open air museum than the usual war memorials full of military pathos and thundering cannons as were erected at Verdun or Stalingrad. The good intentions of the artists and the politicians ultimately proved to be the tragedy of these objects. The Spomeniks were places of forgetting, while they should have been places of remembering. They formed a cheerful backdrop for the bright future awaiting the socialistic model society, the official policy line of which was to smooth over all of the former conflicts. Many commentators on the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s thus declared that the events unfolding were the inevitable extension of the Second World War. The fury unleashed upon the Spomeniks after 1992 was not merely settling the score with the old socialist system, but was also exposing that hidden history that had led to the reopening of Pandora’s box in the first place.

The Antwerp-based photographer Jan Kempenaers undertook a laborious trek through the Balkans to photograph a series of these mysterious objects. He captures the Spomeniks in the misty mountain landscape at sundown. Looking at the photographs one must admit to a certain embarrassment. We see the powerful beauty of the monumental sculptures and we catch ourselves forgetting the victims in whose name they were built. This is in no way a reproach to the photographer, but rather attests to the strength of the images. After all, Kempenaers did not set out as a documentary photographer, but first and foremost as an artist seeking to create a new image. An image so powerful that it engulfs the viewer. He allows the viewer to enjoy the melancholy beauty of the Spomeniks, but in so doing, forces us to take a position on a social issue. The photographs raise the question of whether a former monument can ever function as a pure sculpture, an autonomous work of art, detached from its original meaning. Can a Spomenik follow the opposite trajectory of Koenig’s ‘Sphere’? Can it live on, after its ideological progenitors are dead and gone and its symbolism is no longer intelligible? It has been known to happen. Think of the Casa del Fascio in Como, the headquarters of the Italian fascist party that was built in 1936 by the architect Giuseppe Terragni, and has come to be revered worldwide as an icon of the modernist architecture of the 20th century. Along the way it has managed to completely disassociate itself from the original clients and the sinister plans that they hatched within its walls. 

The Spomeniks have not quite reached this stage yet. They currently stand forlorn and forgotten, where they once would have been encircled by singing young pioneers and long-skirted oldsters with flowers and candles. No people appear in the photographs. They have the air of the morning after a party: the smell of cigarette butts and stale beer, sodden streamers and guttered lanterns. It is the memory of the socialist party that is all over now. And yet, this is precisely what enriches the monuments’ meaning. In their dilapidated condition, they are no longer symbols of victory, but for the first time, true symbols of a newfound mourning. They seem to grieve for the horrors that took place where they stand, 60 years ago. Perhaps this makes them richer, more seasoned, beautiful and effective now. They no longer charm with their pristine beauty, but their gritty countenance commands respect. That is the conjurors’ trick of the Spomeniks, which Kempenaers masterfully reveals in his photographs. 

Willem Jan Neutelings, 2008

Spomenik #11 (Niš), 2007

http://www.jankempenaers.info/works/