The following is an afterword to a translation of Jaime Saenz’s Muerte por el tacto (Death at the Very Touch), forthcoming from Action Books in 2025. This is the first-ever complete translation of this 1957 poem into English and will be accompanied in edition with a translation of Saenz’s “El frío” (“The Cold”), a 1967 poem translated by Kit Schluter.
Jaime Saenz (1921–1986) was the preeminent literary voice of 20th century Bolivia, author of dozens of works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, and drama. From his home in La Paz, he led the Krupp Workshops, night-long gatherings that precipitated an entire generation of literary production in Bolivia. Saenz was an iconoclast, both in his writing and his life—he was famously bisexual, death-obsessed, nocturnal, and debauched.
Muerte por el tacto is among Saenz’s earlier works, inaugurating themes that he would engage throughout his career. In particular, the exaltation of the city as an esoteric, poetic topography and the epistemology of death are two primary concerns. The poem is a hero’s journey through the streets of La Paz, Saenz searching out the occult knowledge of a more totalizing reality understood “at the very touch” with only his exposed intestines as a metaphysical radar and the guidance of his dead friends.
—Ted Dodson
I speak to the dead as I speak to you now, Jaime.
You, who also speak to the dead.
I speak to them in poems, through their work and mine, directly and indirectly. Alice Notley more precisely pictured this act when she said, “The dead have to translate themselves, or be translated by me or into me when they speak…”
I am hesitant to say that translation in general is a communication with the dead, how that might imply the idea of a language being dead until resuscitated through translation. This feels especially insincere if the writer is still living—let alone living-dead. This also doesn’t account for the reciprocating process of translation, the manner in which the matter of meaning drifts into and out of formations, grammars, syntaxes, and words. The accumulations of a word up to the point of being written strains at their own bounds already such that the material of meaning exceeds the form of the word, stretching and bursting it, dissolving the tissues of its sonic, visual, and tactile container.
You write, thinking on the poems of your protégé, Guillermo Bedregal Garcia, “Un poema es siempre hermético; de ahi la sobrecogedora claridad de su contenido. Pues paradójicamente, el contenido en un poema no es comprensible sino a condición de ser hermético—de tal manera, que el contenido en realidad no está inscrito, por asi decirlo, sino que fluye de la textura misma del poema.” [“A poem is always hermetic; hence the overwhelming clarity of its content. Paradoxically as such, the content of a poem is not comprehensible without the condition of being hermetic—in this way, its content in actuality is not inscribed, so to say, but rather flows from the very texture of the poem.”]1
I can read into the tautology that you are so often stringing across your thinking, this double-backing turn of phrase, that one condition cannot exist without the other. As in Muerte por el tacto, one cannot live unless they die, that to die is to live, and that there is a condition of being living-dead that one accesses through mystical experience. However, this particular allusion of yours to hermeticism can be misleading if considered to mean that the poem is sealed-off and inscrutable or purposefully remote or removed, that its vital clarity is kept within a closed circuit. Looking to the Hermetic Tradition and the more occult correspondences of the Hermit itself, who with their lantern held at arm’s length, I hear you say more clearly, “Where I am, you may also be.”2
I see how you have left us with instructions illuminating entry into the sphere of the poem insofar as “…el contenido…fluye de la textura misma del poema.” Like flares arcing off the rind of a star, land sloughing from the tops of mountains, or entrails spilling from the gut, the poem expels the over-sufficiency of its content directly from its surface. What is poetic, then, is a transgression of the bounds where meaning conforms to everyday use—sufficiency, in other words—and the resulting excretion of semantic residuum. The poem’s language is read as a painting’s gaze might pierce its viewer or harsh noise might overstress amplification, its content not written but invariably only accessed as if the poem were a bladder inflated through a portal that the poet had punctured between two worlds.
You write in Muerte por el tacto of las cosas, and the body of this phrase swells with excess meaning. Flowing through translation, las cosas mortifies its English equivalents. Translation is more metabolic than it is creative, and despite what we derive from the literal meaning of poesis, writing poetry (and perhaps all creative acts) is more in line with metabolic process, too. There is no out-of-nothing, poesis being a transformative activity, one that dissolves and reconstitutes, one that mimics in its creation a sort of language death. There are, of course, many things about my language that I think should die—the violences of its imperial and bureaucratic desires, for one, that constitute its everyday sufficiency—and in writing my own poetry, I hope to hasten their decay. To revise Mallarmé’s famous claim, poetry and translation are, in this way, not a purification but a putrefaction of the language of the tribe.
I feel the press of this Saenz-esque language death, the semiotic intestines—your entrañas oscuras as an externalization of the literal metabolic organ—that are instrumentalized like dowsing rods to seek the way of language through the dark streets of interpretation. On a line of any other poem, las cosas appears a benign phrase, translating simply as “the things,” but in Muerte por el tacto, you’re signifying the things in a world of embodied things that are set apart from death, oblivion, and nothingness. Las cosas do not exist outside of the world in which they are present.
I tried “the world” at first. This seemed fitting, considering the context and your interest in German philosophy, to echo Heidegger’s Welt that signifies the totality of things that can be present-at-hand. Still, this isn't the most accurate term, even when it comes to Heidegger. Your usage of las cosas bears more in common with Heidegger’s das Zeug. This term has no true translation into English but is often approximated as “equipment” or “gear” or, sometimes, “the things.” Essentially, it is a collective noun signifying things (Zeug) that exist in the world among other things (Zeug) or as Heidegger describes it, “something in-order-to.” Las cosas bloats with the significance it contains, and “the world” didn’t quite suffice as a container, so I moved onto other equivalents: the real, all things, material, matter, das Zeug, equipment, the flesh, the carnal, the material world, substance, and finally, the very things. It was this latter phrasing that stuck, incorporating that excess of meaning within its syntax, very chosen to cast things back under the penumbra of hiddenness, the occult, which I think you are also searching out, Jaime.
I wonder who it is that you are seeking instruction from in this searching. Who are your dead friends whose antiguo vuelo lights your way?
I found a copy of Guillermo Bedregal Garcia’s Ciudad desde la altura at the New York Public Library. This 1980 book, which you saw into publication in the years after Bedregal Garcia’s death at 20 in a car crash, includes a lengthy introduction that you penned, generously detailing your dead friend’s life and work, his marriage, his poems, and his involvement in your Talleres Krupp workshops. You end with a section entitled “Las piedras y las flores,” a remembrance of a final premonitory visit from Bedregal Garcia in the days before his death.
You write,
Una noche, a principios de octubre, y cuando todo esto se hallaba trabajando febrilmente en los poemas de Ciudad desde la altura, Guillermo apareció en casa. Retornaba de Llojeta—retornaba de la altura, bajo una Lluvia torrencial, y llevaba entres sus manos unas flores y unas piedras—casualmente, era una fecha de especial recordación. Esa noche, a los lejos, se encendia el relámpago, en el silencio—y el recién llegado vestia de negro. En realidad estaba de luto—pensé yo—, y tendria sus razones; las pidreas y las flores querian decir algo.
[One night in early October, while he was in the midst of working feverishly on the poems of Ciudad desde la altura, Guillermo appeared on my doorstep. He was returning from Llojeta3—returning from altitude, under a torrential rain, and carrying between his hands some flowers and some stones—as it happens, it was a date of special remembrance. That night, in the distance, was lightning-lit, silent—and this newcomer was dressed in black. In truth, he was mourning—I thought—and he had his reasons; the stones and the flowers wanted to say something.]4
This recollection of him, the prefigure of his own death, adorned in funerary clothes and holding these speaking symbols, conjures Guillermo as a manifestation of your own peripatetic ideal of the living dead. He is not yet dead, but he is already one of your dead friends, in possession of a poetic vision initiated within eternity. In draping this pall across the living, the channel of memory reveals its bidirectional nature, and I see how the dead friends of Muerte por el tacto—as they exist in an undifferentiated multitude—are those whom you have met and those whom you have yet to meet. Guillermo, who was a child unbeknown to you when you wrote this poem, was still one of those dead friends among whom you consider mis maestros even if you had yet to encounter his later incarnation as a poet presenting you with rocks and flowers imbued with the significance of a spiritual journey from the holy heights of your city, La Paz.
You continue, in deciphering the stones’ and flowers’ desire to speak,
Dificilmente damos crédito a las más simples y elementales verdades; y no ya por desreidos, pero antes bien por ingenuous. Y cerramos los ojos a la realidad. Pues así como el mundo es mineral y vegetal a un mismo tiempo, así también es el hombre. De niños hemos aprendido que los vegetales eternamente se renuevan y las piedras no tienen para qué, desde que no mueran. Y esta verdad tiende mucho que ver con una remota juventud y con incomensurables amplitudes en las cuales ha de hallarse navegando en estos momentos y en todos los momentos el poeta.
[We strain to give credit to the simplest and most elementary truths; and not out of disbelief, but more readily out of obliviousness. We close our eyes to reality. For just as the world is mineral and vegetal all at once, so is man. As children we have learned that vegetation is eternally renewed and stones have no purpose, insofar as they do not die. And this truth has everything to do with a dim and distant youth and with the incommensurable amplitudes that the poet must find themselves navigating in these moments and in all moments.]5
These stones and flowers—las cosas—that Gullermo bears are what you describe as the elemental conditions of being human and the natural world at large, the simultaneity of renewal and deathless eternity. And the poetic amplitudes that you write of are literalized in Guillermo’s journey to the summit of Llojeta, an Aymara word meaning se hunde, it sinks, a reference to the frequent landslides originating from its soft and precipitous slopes. It’s a place of enormous significance for you as well, that you called “…una comarca de magos y de brujos, de adivinos y suicidas…” Guillermo died the day after his serendipitous visit, and he was interred in one of the many cemeteries of Llojeta, specifically the cemetery known as “Las flores.”
I search and pull up an image of “Las flores,” of the heavy-set headstones with their carved recesses, altars set into the stone to hold gathered flowers, the headstones themselves surrounded and held by flowers held in turn by the crags of Llojeta. Are these pansies, sunflowers, and some variety of baccharis I see, each with their bright yellow faces vibrant in the altitude, so high as to be almost pressed to the glass of the sky, the flowers that Guillermo was clutching when he arrived at your home? Or was he bringing the whole cemetery with him?
You have a well-documented history of bringing the cemetery home with you, Jaime, your mother having discovered pilfered limbs from the local medical college hidden under your bed. Was this a desire to be as close to death as possible, a sort of memento mori? My own sensibilities find this to be the most rational explanation for your morbid purloining, but there’s something in all likelihood that doesn’t culturally translate in this instance. It might sound strange to say it this way, but the keeping of corpse parts at home is completely unfamiliar to mainstream US American life. However, the keeping of skulls, ñatitas, in the home is an indigenous Aymara practice and considered somewhat commonplace in La Paz. Even the local police keep a ñatita, apparently consulted to solve the unsolvable (leave it to the constabulary to conscript even the dead to their uses). They are the skulls of family members or, more frequently, those unrelated to their keeper that are venerated and decorated, not seen as a representative of a helpful or protective spirit but as a living being. The belief is that the skull, and the corpse by extension, is alive.
I suppose this is in keeping with your work, too, Jaime, that the poem as a very thing is never inert. There is a refrain that I’ve often repeated to classes I’ve taught: The poem is not a corpse. This is to say, using less imagistic terms, that a poem is a living thing insofar as it is mutable and reactive. Contexts shift and the poem with them. The interplay of the poem’s active textures transmits an essential charge of semiotics, unique as fingerprints to the poet, not intended for autopsy or dissection but rather experience.
You, though, have me reconsidering this dismissal of the poem-corpse. If a corpse is not incompatible with living, perhaps the poem is a corpse. After all, the charge that I had thought enlivened the poem does not recall the automatic electricity that, for instance, motivates a heart to beat, whose even-tempoed patter would dictate that all language applies its meaning consistently across context. What is communicated within a poem as a part of its biologic process embodies a sort of undoing, a necrobiome of language. Its composition metabolizes language’s tender fibers—de-composition, so to say. And this is, in essence, how we encounter the poem as well after it has been written, insofar as the writing of the poem and the reading of the poem are synonymous as an experience of it. Translation, too, figures into this simulacrum of decomposition as another means of experiencing the mortification of the poetic body. Translation is a moribund instrument—in the sense that you might mean it to be, Jaime—that, by accumulating the meaning of one poem in the body of another, discloses this decomposition process. It’s not a coincidence that composition and compost share an etymological origin in the Latin componere, “to put together.” Even one of Bernadette Mayer’s prompts tells us to “Write a poem about garbage,” which I take to mean to write a poem about poetry, about the composting of language as art, dumped outside the bounds of commercial use as any old trash might be.
I mean this endearingly—I do love trashy poetry—and also in all seriousness, that the poem is a surfeit, a surplus that exists holographic to our world’s very real profusion of refuse or the surpluses seen as so detrimental to the market economy. The poem, like the corpse, has no use value. To enlist it as otherwise, like the cops do their skull, would be a sort of desecration.
I mean this as you might mean it, too, Jaime.
You, who take joy from the image of yourself as a disemboweled urban mystic, the hermit who fashioned his outstretched lantern from his own antenna-like viscera, also hold the corpse-world of the poem, the metabolic heap, in preponderance as a very thing to the other very things of the world. As you write,
…todo está revelado y que la revelación solamente cabe en los muertos
por eso
cuando se comprenda muchas cosas por el tacto
incomprensibles para los demás sentidos
se sabrá que todo es lo mismo
y que es sin embargo distinto
las cosas serán tan inmóviles como nunca, las personas alcanzarán una dignidad jamás alcanzada…
[…everything is already revealed and that revelation only conforms in the dead
therefore
when one comes to apprehend many things at the very touch
incomprehensible to the other senses
it will be known that all is the same
and each of the all is nevertheless distinct.
The very things will be as immovable as nothing, and people will attain a dignity never before attained.]
I could be taking some liberty in reflecting what you see in los muertos onto an idea of what can be achieved through the poem itself, but I think you know this is not a misrepresentation of your work. The occult process of the communion with the dead happens within the poem and serves as a record of its happening. To say otherwise would be to say, as you put it, “las cosas son contempladas como si no fueran parte de uno mismo…” [“Very few things are thought about as if they were not part of a single sameness…”] As one of your translators—perhaps one of your dead friends as well, if I can be so presumptive—I speak to you through our work together, as I would speak among the dead within any act of writing, and it feels like a flowing between worlds, much like the emptying of life into death or death into life, like matter collapses into itself pushing a hole into space, the quality of which is unknown to most, though not to you.
You know this quality, this point of drift between worlds, and named it el tacto, “the very touch.” It’s another word whose poetic valence overflows its own routine limits in the context of the poem, being both an occulted sensation, the tactile “touch of death,” and an idea of social probity among the dead, “tact” so to say. It’s so cheeky of you to consider there to be a decorum requirement between the living and the deceased when your everyday debaucherous and wild comportment—in other words, disemboweled—was a purposeful affront to your living, bourgeois contemporaries. It’s also befitting in that it’s of philosophical consequence—this is the germ of oblivion that “hace que rueden dos bilitas siendo tan solo una y se confirma lo yerto” [“sends two marbles rolling such that they are one and in turn confirms the two have seized up into one”]—and culturally material in its correspondence with the relationship that the Aymara people model in their veneration of the skull and their dead, the weave and weft of Bolivian indigeneity being so central to the political thrust of the class struggle that you identified with. The very touch is how one comports themselves among (dead) friends as much as it is the simple, sensorial gateway to your idealized living-dead experience of the very things, an absolute encounter with reality.
You speak to the dead as you speak to me now, Jaime, “…como recién nacido / o como recién muerto…” The very touch is the certain though approximated bridge in our speaking, where the two of us communicate as we would communicate to our other dead friends in poems, where we listen to them, as Notley says, “translate themselves.” It’s approximated because language fails to reflect what it is to access the very touch as an experience, which is only encountered in manifest within the poem, translating the dead into yourself as you and I have.
I, who also speak to the dead.
Brooklyn, June 2024
Notes
- Bedregal Garcia, Guillermo. Ciudad desde la altura, La Paz – Bolivia, Imprenta y Librería “Renovación” Ltda., 1980. Page 11.
- Waite, Arthur Edward. The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, University Books, 1966. Page 104.
- Llojeta is a mountainous area on the east side of La Paz, home to one of its highest elevation barrios—and, therefore, one of its poorest—and considered to be of spiritual significance, especially to the Aymara people.
- Bedregal Garcia, Page 18.
- Ibid.