(Soir Blue, by Edward Hopper, 1914)

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Baudelaire, 1845: Homo Duplex

El papel está en blanco
y yo estoy irritado contra la ciudad entera.
La página carcomida por la falta de escritura
es el reflejo del agua bendita,
el confesionario donde me eximo de pagar
mis obligaciones de conciencia.

Soy un aparador repleto de facturas;
mi cerebro, un cementerio como orgía de gusanos
que se arrastran hasta oler
el aroma corrompido del frasco
y la tinta es un borracho en el fondo de una taberna
que multiplica con el licor su sed.

Cuando al fin alcanzo en algo las palabras
lo indecible conforma un panorama
            lleno de amenazas
porque nada hay más peligroso que estar dividido
como dos amantes que no logran acomodarse
hasta convertirse en la escultural inercia de la carne. 

Poeta-persona, mi doble naturaleza:
una espada de los ciervos en el bosque,
animales salvajes que se ejercitan en la esgrima
solitariamente acorralados. 

Bestia y hombre no forman más que un solo ser
mi dolor son las sentencias de un otro delator;
el verso, un cadáver sin descanso
de un muerto que nunca termino de matar.

Detestable evidencia de mis malas artes.

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Baudelaire, 1845: Homo Duplex

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Blank sheet
I am pissed with the entire city.
The page mangled by the lack of writing
is the reflection of the holy water,
the confessional booth where I am exempt from paying
the dues of my conscience.  

I am a cupboardfull of bills;
my brain, a cemetery like an orgy of worms
which drag themselves to smell
the stench of the jar
and the ink is a drunk man at the back of a tavern
who multiplies his thirst with liquor.  

When I finally reach the words
the unspeakable forms a picture
             full of threats
for there is nothing more dangerous than being divided
like two lovers who cannot fit together
until they become the sculptural inertia of the flesh.

Poet–personae, my double nature:
the sword of the deer in the woods,
primitive animals who train their fencing
solitarily cornered.

Man and beast become just one
my pain are the words of that tale-tell other;
the verse, the restless corpse
of a man I am never done with.

Appalling evidence of my evil trade.
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The movement of Arriagada Zubieta's poetry throughout Hotel Stitges (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2018) takes place on a truly experiential level, playing on great impulses, from the aesthetic point of view, over the dark art and trade of poetry (“the poet already lives forgotten / under a dead sky of doves”; “He preferred, instead, to disappear in a dark chamber (...) / and grow winters old inside / on the margin of his time”); and, taking less comfortable, more prophetic leaps, approaching those of Rimbaud (“Beautiful are the centuries that will come. / Everything expands, dragged by a drunken boat”; “A new season approaches”).

A second layer, or movement, takes place in the very formation of the author. Here we find Mallarmé, or the creation of a poem from the origin of a painting by Hopper (Soir Bleu, 1914). Even more representative is the mask he appropriates, in the mode of a dramatic and self-referential monologue, from Charles Baudelaire in “Baudelaire, 1845: Homo Duplex”:

Poeta-persona, mi doble naturaleza:
una espada de los ciervos en el bosque,
animales salvajes que se ejercitan en la esgrima
solitariamente acorralados.
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Rodrigo Arriagada-Zubieta (Viña del Mar, Chile, 1982) is a poet, translator, and literary critic. He writes regularly for journal and press Buenos Aires Poetry, where he is also director of the international poetry collection “Pippa Passes”. His poems have been translated to Italian and Spanish and published in Chile, Austria, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, the United States, Italy, and Spain. His verse collections include Extrañeza (2017), Hotel Sitges (2018), Zubieta (2020), and El Greco (2021), all published by Buenos Aires Poetry. His work has been anthologized in Chile as Una Temporada en la cabeza (2020), from Editorial Santiago Inédito. As a translator, he has published Cutty Sark (Poesía escogida) by Hart Crane (Buenos Aires Poetry, 2020). He is currently completing his doctoral studies in Hispanic letters at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He lives in Alicante, Spain.