Sergio Holas (part 1)

Speaker 1 (ID) 00:02

This is a Vision Australia Radio podcast.

Speaker 2 00:18

On Vision Australia Radio, welcome to our conversations on the work and experiences of emerging writers. I'm Kate Cooper, and our guest today is the Chilean-Australian poet, academic and translator Sergio Holas Veliz. Sergio was born in Valparaiso in Chile and came to Australia in 1988. He has taught literature and literary theory at universities in Chile, Australia and New Zealand, and has a Ph.D from the University of New South Wales.
Sergio recently retired as head of the Spanish department at the University of Adelaide. Sergio's poems, translations, books and articles have been published in journals in Australia and overseas in both Spanish and English.

As well as translating poetry from Spanish to English, Sergio has published collections of his own poems, and during our conversations we'll be reading from his published works. Welcome to the program Sergio. You grew up in Valparaiso in Chile. Would you begin by telling our listeners about where Valparaiso is situated and why it is of such cultural and historical significance to the people of Chile?

Speaker 3 01:35

Thank you for inviting me first, and then Valparaiso is or used to be the main port in the country of Chile in South America all over the 19th and 20th century until the Panama channel was built and then it became a second-class port, it disappeared from the map. It used to be one of the most cosmopolitan port in that area in the south of South America. I understand that the first Labour prime minister was born in Valparaiso and he came after three or four years to this country, so there are links from the very beginning between Chile or Valparaiso and Australia and especially Adelaide which is a port very similar with lots of hills around and a beautiful sea and so on and so forth. Valparaiso is also important because as a port it was a point of arrival for many people from many places of the world. 

You have to remember that through the years and through the history of that area and the planet in general, when war took over certain places in Europe many people migrated to other places in the planet - and Valparaiso was one of them. The last great migration into Valparaiso was from Spain - in fact during and after the civil war in Spain many writers, many publishers, intellectuals, poets went to exile - some to Mexico, some others to Buenos Aires and to Valparaiso as well... and Pablo Neruda, our national poet, was in charge of helping these exiles from Spain to get to to Valparaiso. So it's... a main port which is beautifully constructed, organised, urbanised, with many universities... and all the hills have a view of the sea, which is an impressive sea, very deep and poetic in that sense... so that's my town.

Speaker 2 04:15

So you, you've been an academic both in Chile and here in Australia, where you arrived more than 30 years ago. What was it that drew you as a young man to the study of literature and then inspired you to become a teacher and an academic?

Speaker 3 04:31

I think it's the social environment, the company, the friends, the place, they are all related. And somehow people in Valparaiso, it's deeply involved in telling stories about Valparaiso... and that on one side, on the other side my whole family, all of them has been teachers since the beginning of or the first part of the 20th century. My grandmother, Marta, she was the head of school when women were not in important places in society. My dear Rebecca was a teacher as well. My father was a teacher of English. My stepmother Margarita was also a teacher of English. I never took seriously English then, without knowing what the future was going to offer me later on in my life and so on and so forth. 

So I come from a family that is in building, education is in building that family. So I am the continuation of that line and of course my son Israel is an academic as well in Melbourne and my son Ruben works within the school department as well.

Speaker 2 06:10

So continuing the family tradition in the next generation. Sergio, as we mentioned in the introduction, you undertook a Ph.D at the University of New South Wales. What was the focus of your dissertation?

Speaker 3 06:25

I tried, when I arrived, I wrote to many universities that had a Spanish department. I received an answer from the University of New South Wales. I presented a project on the Cuentos, the short narrative of the foremost Chilean writer of the second part of the 20th century, Jose Donoso. And I wrote, I developed the research, which was, and I think it's the only, Ph.D on all of his short stories, and I completed that one. And I had to read lots, both in Spanish and English, because Jose Donoso was, when young, he went to various places and participated in the United States in courses at different universities, in which, as a completely bilingual person, he took on those courses with the aim of beginning his writing career.

He knew he was going to be a writer and insisted on that all his life. But suddenly, at a certain moment, he said, I could not dream in English. And so he decided he was going to be writing in Spanish. And of course, his career was completely one of the most important in the Chilean narrative of the boom era in the 70s. His novel, The Obscene Birds of the Night, based on a phrase by William James, became one of the most important novels of the boom of the Spanish and Latin American literature of the 70s. So that was the focus of my dissertation.

Speaker 2 08:39

And when you were writing your dissertation, you mentioned that you were reading in both English and Spanish. Did you think in both languages about it?

Speaker 3 08:49

No. No, it took me a long, long, long time to settle with English. Firstly, because I was teaching Spanish full-time, I was required to use my Spanish language all the time at school, because I taught at school in Ipswich, in Queensland, in Brisbane. So I have been teaching and developing programs from the very basics to the most advanced levels. But in all of them, I was required to use my Spanish. So English was always a support language. But in theoretical terms, I read a lot of the translation of the French or the German or the Spanish into English, which I could get hold of, and all the theoretical things that I used to do in those times, because I taught literary theory then in Chile as well. 

So at the University of Católica de Valparaiso, which defined at a very specific time in my life that I was going to work on the border between literature and philosophy and what today is called creative writing. I wrote my thesis in Spanish, not in English. Later on, when I finished, I completed that, and I began to teach at different universities. I had students writing, I supervise students, writing their thesis in Spanish as well, but they were of English speaking background. So I realised the difficulty of having to push yourself in order to structure the tenses in such a way that would convey exactly what you want to say. Syntactically, phonetically, semantically, and grammatically at all levels.

So it's one of the harder tasks, because it's not an exact science. And here is when creative writing, poetry, and thinking all the time about language helps you to realise that there is no exact translation between one or the other. You always risk uncertainty in that border. But the key thing is that you specify what your problems are. You specify what the limits of your knowledge is, and as soon as you specify that, it opens at all where you can begin to work without contradicting yourself and so on. Today, that is called situated knowledge. You situate yourself in a specific experience of life, in a specific language, in a specific social group, in a specific education, in a specific location. 

Because a speaker from Valparaiso would have ways to say things that are different to those used by people in the north of Chile, for example. Every location has specific words for specific experiences that sometimes do not translate. You have to use your poetical skills to approximate. And you specify, you say, well, this is an approximation, this is a variation of this and that and that. As long as you specify what you are doing, then translation is possible.

Speaker 2 12:44

I think that identifies that translation itself is a creative writing practice, but also in particularly, say, translating from English into Spanish, but also coming back into English. Every region within Chile, as you point out, but also then every one of all the Spanish-speaking countries have their own words, a number of words that have come into the language from the indigenous languages. And I know from my own experience living and working in Nicaragua, that there were words I picked up, like the word for Turkey, which in Spain is pavo and it's chompipe in Nicaragua. So there are regionalisms, there are local words, just as there are, you know, if people compare Australian English with English spoken in the United States or in Britain or in the many places of the world where English is now spoken. So there are all those factors that you juggle when you're translating.

Speaker 3 13:44

Exactly. And this is today with all this awareness about colonisation and decolonisation. Populations have come to realise that yes, we do share one language which is Spanish and which is taught through the country and through the programs of that language in that country. Nonetheless, Chilean natives of the Spanish language don't realise that, as it happened to me, don't realise that we consider certain terms, certain words as Spanish, but they come from a different language. For example, in Chile, I feel pain in my tummy, see, stomach. Guata is a Mapuche word for stomach, but the common expression in Chile is all through Chile is guata, guatita, see? And we think it's Chilean term. No, it's not. It comes from the Mapuche language, which is quite interesting because probably in Spain that happens through regional terms that go through Castellano and change the language itself. 

And with the word goes also at a different level or in different domain a way of feeling or expressing that term. So languages is all of these things we say about the grammar or the syntaxes and so on, which is the orderly way to speak a language, but also the effects that are underneath that are coupled together. See, the effects, the moods, the body is coupled to the culture of the language, which is quite interesting. This is something we have kept divided or separated for a long, long, long time. But now we have come to realise that we must relate these different domains and put them together because that's what forms the totality in which we live.

Speaker 2 16:10

That's right. And you and I were speaking before we came on air about cultures within cultures, as you say. So in the Australian culture, there are dozens, more than dozens of different languages that are spoken within our community on a daily basis. There are Australia's indigenous languages, a number of which are still spoken, others are being retrieved and revived. So even within what's on paper in English speaking country, we have a whole lot of different systems of language that influence how people use English on a daily basis.

Speaker 3 16:50

Exactly, this is interesting, and all these different layers would somehow form our specificity in Australia. This is what is specific of us Australians, that we are moving within these complex sets of relationships between different languages. This is what we should be educated in, not one single language, but how we connect these things, and I'm sure we would be avoiding many, many problems.

Speaker 2 17:36

on Vision Australia Radio, you're listening to our conversation program Emerging Writers. Our guest today is the Chilean-Australian poet, academic and translator Sergio Holas Veliz. Learning another language helps strengthen your own first language because you look back into your first language, you think about the comparisons, you think about, Oh, I've just learnt that in Spanish, for example, or French or Chinese. How would I explain that in English? And so it's a mutually beneficial process before even bringing in all of the other social and cultural benefits of learning another language.

Speaker 3 18:23

Exactly, and of course it also strengthens your own perception, you know, builds up on your own image as a person that can understand the processes through which that person is going through. Most people don't go into that, but that's the main point of living in countries like Australia, where you are exposed to many different ways of doing things, and the question is to know, to get to know how you do these things with the help of what languages, what terms, what cultures, and so on and so forth, instead of feeling the compulsion to reduce yourself to a single expression of something. 

I think the world is becoming more and more complex, so we have to develop this capacity, this ability to, not to merge, but to put together different things, and sometimes opposite things, and try to understand how these relationships are operating within oneself, not externally to yourself, but within yourself. Because you are the key, you are the key, outside is an order which will command you to do this and that and that and so on, but doesn't help in the end to understand what you are doing. So self-knowledge is the key to everything, the more you love what you do, the more you go into it, without constraints, without fears, and so on.

Speaker 2 20:08

Spoken like a true poet, which you are. And I wanted to ask you, Sergio, which came first, writing your own poems or translating the works of other poets?

Speaker 3 20:20

I think the first task of a writer is to read. Nothing new, this was something that, for example, Jorge Luis Borges said many, many years ago. And this is why he is so important, because it's something you will realise if you want to be a writer, that you have to read. So you read and read and read, because without the others, you cannot have a sense of self at all. Language is made by all of us. There is another magnificent, this time Chilean singer, Violeta Parra, who also was a magnificent writer, who says that in one of her main poems, Gracias a la Vida, thanks to life, in which it says that the songs is made by everyone, not by a single person. It means that this poet somehow is using a tool, which is language which is made by everyone. 

This idea that you can live as an individual without others, it's nonsense, complete nonsense. And it's required for you to be enhanced, the sense of separation, simply because you have to compete. This is a society in which you have to compete. But the fact is that if you want to grow as a human being, you cannot compete. Nothing competes in nature. Nature is about sharing things. Trees do not compete for the sun, for the light of the sun, for the heat of the sun. All that is just an explanation, very rational sometimes, but there is no competition. And by extension, you can learn that, for example, in my case as a Latin American of Valparaiso's background, I'm not going to say Chilean because I'm from Valparaiso, your understanding is always limited to your situation, to your circumstance.

And that's it. So there is nothing which could be called or generalised. Your experience is always specific. By very basic things, your gender. If you are a male, you are of a male, it's a different experience. And how do we relate when we have all these divisions and separations? Simply by listening, and listening has to do with your question, reading, and reading has to do with writing in the sense that if you listen, you are allowing space for whatever it is that the other person is saying within you, within you. Your space yourself is not an external process only. It's an internal process where you space yourself so the other person comes in. And we experience all of this every day. 

For example, when you fall in love, fall in love in English, falling in love, falling in love. What is it that we call falling in love? To fall into a hole or something like that. It's very interesting because it's a metaphor. So we are using metaphors all the time. All the time, even in language we think it's not metaphorical. It's objective. But the fact is that when you fall in love, what you are doing is allowing within yourself space for whoever it is that is coming, this other person. When a granddaughter or grandson is born, you think about it, you put names, you do research, you speak, you get entangled with arguments in favor of this name or the other name, and this is all poetry.

To name a person that is still not born, so you are spacing yourself... and this is the key for whatever it is that you want to do when you say you want to be a writer because it's about language - how we use language, what is the effect of language in your life, how it does create space for the expression of something you feel which is love - and love is not an angel throwing darts or rocks to wake you up, no no no, love is the act of spacing, of expanding yourself in a positive way in which you are allowing space for the other person within yourself. And that is what we call today experience, but we also call it... it's an experience that comes to you through reflection, reflection - and in this sense all of these things are poetic practices.

So if you put that dimension onto the language you use all the time in different situations how these expressions in your language relate to a foundation, which is in the deepest part of your body - and which is either emotion or moods then or preferences... then you will see that the body, the matter is related to the spirit, the language - so body, matter and spirit in material things - which we hear, we put down in writing, but in fact they are somehow in material things - so all of these things are related, are connected, they are not separated. So when we say for example, objectivity and imagination, and we separate or we say truth and imagination... so it does, it means that whatever it is that we imagine does not exist... it's a good question for for a poet, for a creative person. 

So is that a way of exploring as a valid instrument, to get to know what you want to do, what you want to create, what you desire, what you imagine through words? Or it's just the crazy things you see and you dispel all of this nonsense and say, Oh poetry doesn't help you to live in any way... which is what you find when you when you say that you are a poet or you feel a poet, mainstream society rejects that, rejects the imagination - they want us to be kind of simple people that works with material things. But when you are a teacher when you are a psychiatrist you when you are a psychologist, you are working mainly with imagination - if you don't have imagination there is no expansion of of the world and you have to expand first and then do.

Speaker 2 28:08

Thank you so much, Sergio. I'm really enjoying our conversation about philosophy and literature, so let's continue with part two in next week's program. Our guest on Emerging Writers Today was the Chilean-Australian poet, academic and translator Sergio Holas Veliz. Sergio is the author of the poetry collections Distancia Cerro, published in 2004, Suda Divivida in 2006, Paisajes en Movimiento in 2013, Rayo de Tinevelas o el Pajoro Endones in 2016, and Adelaide, Rumbling on my Mind, also in 2016. These poetry collections were all published in Chile by Elysiones Altasor. 

This program can be heard at the same time each week on Vision Australia Radio, VA Radio on Digital, online at varadio.org and also on Vision Australia Radio podcasts, where you can catch up on earlier episodes. Thanks for listening to this Vision Australia Radio Podcast. Don't forget to subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. Visit varadio.org for more. 

ID 29:41

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