This portfolio brings together writing by Peruvian poet Roger Santiváñez’s beginning in the mid-1980s and into the early 1990s, or from his book Homenaje para iniciados to his 1991 book Symbol.
Panel of winners of el Premio Libro de Poesía Breve, 2011. Image from Hipocampo Editores, via Wikimedia Commons.
By the time Roger Santiváñez published his chapbook Symbol, which is often thought of as marking a turn in his writing toward a neobaroque poetics post-1991, he had come to live in the United States, where he has resided since.
From El chico que se declaraba con la mirada (Lima: Asalto Al Cielo, 1988)
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Ipa. Your mini-pool. The Theater. At the Santa Isabel roundabout, my black-haired head. Rock and roll. Between your thighs. Aquamarine pants and good little girl moccasins. Dreamer. Flyer. A strange taste for letters. Writing poems. One for tonight at 8. And boom there I am on the old sidewalks and swings and willows. Destroyed. Ana María Iparraguirre. Song that left off like wind at the airport. In the nothing of the next pages.
Rimac, Lima, Peru. Photo by Bruno Locatelli/CIFOR, via Flickr.
Translator’s note: Silvia Goldman’s essay was originally published as “Symbol de Roger Santiváñez: La letra que sobra es la letra que falta” in Góngora & Argot: Ensayos sobre la poesía de Roger Santiváñez, an anthology edited by Paul Guillén and published in July 2015 by Collages de aleWendorff. It has been edited lightly for publication in Jacket2 and appears here in translation for the first time. — Judah Rubin
Mariano Mantel, “En el caos urbano,” Lima, Peru, via Flickr.
Translator’s note: Luis Fernando Chueca’s essay was originally published as “Violencia política, nación peruana y poesía en ‘La guerra con Chile’ de Roger Santiváñez” in Góngora & Argot: Ensayos sobre la poesía de Roger Santiváñez, an anthology edited by Paul Guillén and published in July 2015 by Collages de aleWendorff. It has been edited lightly for publication in Jacket2 and appears here in translation for the first time. — Judah Rubin
Image of a pier in the Miraflores district of Lima by Paulo Guereta, via Wikimedia Commons.
Translator’s note: Germán Labrador Méndez’s essay was originally published as “La Lengua de la Kloaka: lenguaje, guerra civil, memoria y fármacos en Symbol (1991) de Roger Santiváñez.” Versions were published in Góngora & Argot: Ensayos sobre la poesía de Roger Santiváñez, an anthology edited by Paul Guillén and published in July 2015 by Collages de aleWendorff and in <
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