Jaime Luis Huenún

PUERTO TRAKL [Fragmento #1]

Language: spanish

Translations: german (PUERTO TRAKL), italian (PUERTO TRAKL [Frammento #1])

PUERTO TRAKL [Fragmento #1]

Bajé a Puerto Trakl entre neblinas.
Buscaba el bar de la buena suerte
para charlar sobre la travesía.
Pero todos vigilaban la estrella polar en sus copas,
mudos como el mar frente a una isla desierta.
Salí a vagar por las calles con faroles rojos.
Las mujeres se ofrecían sin afecto, fragantes y cansadas.
“A Puerto Trakl los poetas, vienen a morir”, me dijeron
sonriendo en todos los idiomas del mundo.
Yo les dejé poemas que pensaba llevar a mi tumba
como prueba de mi paso por la tierra.

Jaime Luis Huenún

photo © Álvaro de la Fuente

* 17.12.1967, Valdivia, Chile
lives in: Santiago,

Jaime Luis Huenún Villa was born in 1967 in Valdivia in southern Chile, the son of a Mapuche-Huilliche and a Chilean woman. He grew up in Osorno, near the Rahue River, which appears in many of his poems. In his poems, which he writes in Spanish, the award-winning Mapuche-Huilliche poet combines the largely lost oral tradition of the Mapuche with the typical interculturality of the literatures of Latin America. He has won, among others, the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chilean National Council for Arts and Culture for the best literary work in 2013 for the volume "Reducciones". The Spanish of the poems, which occasionally evokes the language of the conquistadors with archaic echoes and transports the reader back to colonial times, is repeatedly interwoven with remnants of a lost indigenous language of origin that Hunéun still knew in his childhood. At the same time, Huenún always seeks in his texts a reference to the lyrical tradition of Latin America, especially to César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, and also intercultural networking with lyric traditions of the Western world, especially Europe (see, for example, his volumes of poetry Puerto Trakl, 2001, or Calle Mandelstam, 2016).

photo © Álvaro de la Fuente

He has also edited several anthologies of Mapuche and other Latin American indigenous poetry, including Epu mari ülkatufe ta fachantü: 20 poetas mapuche contemporáneos (Lom, 2003). Two of his books are available in English translation: Port Trakl (Diálogos, 2008) and Fanon City Meu (Action Books, 2018).

Huenún lives in Santiago, where he works in the Intercultural Studies Department of the Chilean Ministry of Culture.

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