Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (translated with Kent Johnson)
Finalist for 2003 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation
“Falsely insulated from our neighbors to the South, we have had
to wait for poets to bring us news from that part of the world. Kent Johnson
and Forrest Gander’s translation of the great Bolivian poet Jaime
Saenz is, indeed, news. Their meticulous selection and exuberant versions
cut across false dichotomies, proving that real innovation occurs in many
places at the same time.”
-PEN Citation
“Bolivian Jaime Saenz is an amazing find, one of the most dynamic,
exciting and unpredictable poets I’ve seen translated into English
in a long time. Kent Johnson and Forrest Gander have gathered long and
short poems that unfold layer upon layer of fantastic, innovative, and
symbolic language…. The result is a poetry that escapes categorization
because Saenz’ ghostly presence weaves itself one step ahead of
the reader. As the first translation of his work into English, this book
deserves wide recognition.”
-Bloomsbury Review, Sept-Oct, 2002
Immanent Visitor “barrels along, sweeping the reader with it….
I believe this is an important book which… offers a radically different
experience from that to which we are used in the Anglo-American tradition”.
–Tony Frazer, Shearsman (England)
“Saenz’s lifelong meditation on death was not some shabby
postmodern excursus on the vacancies of subjectivity. The absence of the
imagination must itself be imagined, Wallace Stevens proposed, and imagining
that absence in all its rich and mysterious forms, was Saenz’s errand,
one he pursued with ardent passion…. His short lyrics snap with
rapid transitions and mix colloquial and arcane language…. Saenz
veers jaggedly and happily from reticence to flamboyance, from supplication
to swagger…. In typical poéte maudit fashion, Saenz pits
his heroic self-abasement against the timidity and complacency of bourgeois
life.”
- John Palattella, Bookforum, Fall 2002
“These are persuasive, delectable translations of poems which are
a game of paradox, of logic and illogic, of illusion and disillusion in
which words speed and spill across the page, their precipitous ease and
swoosh seeming to suggest that the poet is casting out in so much language,
so much meaningless prattle and clatter, and finally, in that very expanse,
that near nonsensical noise, locating, however temporarily, a perch, a
place to alight, a moment of contemplation that can exist only within
such serious, playful complexity.”
-Jen Hofer, No Magazine, Spring 2003
"The appearance of Jaime Saenz in English is a major event for all of us
who live and write within that language. In this authoritative selection and
translation by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson, he enters the imagination of
North America-a later but crucial member of the pantheon of west coast
South American poets that includes Neruda, Vallejo, Huidobro, and Parra. The
poetry is relentless and the genius of the man who made it inescapable. For
a poetry of awakening and terror, this is the place to look."
-Jerome Rothenberg
"These poems in translation are a revelation, a masterful conceit .
. . .The poems and the reader are both kept off balance until they levitate
into a trance, el momento of fusion where poetry begins. It is a great
thing to witness this translation as event, the coming of Saenz into a
new 'us,' a moment when poetry can be read as 'ours,' meaning 'north and
south connected.' This is nuestra poesía."
-Cecilia Vicuña