a part i enjoyed, from the middle of the poem "La Francesa":I don't want to die, she whispered while escaping / In the shrewd darkness of the bedroom, / And I really didn't know what to say, / Except to caress her and support her while she moved / Up and down like life, /Up and down like the poets of France, / Innocent and punished, / Until she returned to Planet Earth / And from her lips sprouted / Passages from her adolescence that filled our bedroom on the spot / With copies crying in metro escalators / With copies making love to two guys at once / While rain was falling outside / Over garbage bags and over abandoned pistols / In the garbage bags, / Rain that washes everything / Except for memory and reason. / Dresses, leather jackets, Italian boots, lingerie to drive you mad / To drive her mad, / They appeared and disappeared in our phosphorescent, throbbing bedroom, / And quick strokes of other less intimate adventures / Flashed in her wounded eyes like fireflies. These poems were about what I expected after reading The Savage Detectives. It was interesting to see some familiar scenes played out in a different manner with a more compact delivery. The Spanish is included and you can get a sense of the rhythm of the originals even if you can't read Spanish. Reading poetry in translation is always a problem, potentially even more so than prose since rhymes and flow can very easily get lost, but just reading the Spanish without understanding coupled with the translation gives a fair idea of the whole.
Do You like book Los Perros Románicos (1993)?
I haven't read Bolano's prose yet. I started with his poetry because the author first considered himself a poet. I can say, having read and reread this book, that there were moments while reading this book when I felt like Salieri from the movie Amadeus. There is such raw talent and more than honesty coursing through these lines. There are disappointments, flirtations, jokes, and brutal acts waiting here.I highly recommend this as an inspiration to read Bolano's other work.
—Jose
in some ways these poems were exactly what i expected from my experience with 'the savage detectives,' yet in other ways their sensitivity and unsure footing left me literally with my mouth agape. these are heart-rending postcards from the mind of a lost poet, one who has glimpsed beauty in the fantastic, but also the mundane and the entropic. nice edition too w/ the original spanish on facing pages.
—Tim_mills2
En español! Mi primero viaje por la literatura hispanoamericana.
—herika
