Sergio Holas (Part 2)

Speaker 1 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 I guess today is the Chilean-Australian poet, academic and translator, Sergio Holas Veliz. We spoke last week about Sergio's background from Valparaiso and from a family of teachers and about his academic work in literature and philosophy. And we spoke about the relationship between languages and the different language influences in our community. I'm delighted to continue the conversation with Sergio this week to talk more about writing and translating poetry. Sergio, welcome to the programme. 

Sergio, in your poetry and in your translating, you move between and among languages. Would you read for us your poem Degrees of Separation from your collection Adelaide, Rambling on My Mind?

Speaker 3 01:22

Degrees of separation, what European words didn't exist in the Aboriginal languages, what Aboriginal words didn't exist in the European languages, those in existent words are shadows between you and me, our degrees of separation. So, there is something, instead of nothing, something that exist as shadows, outside language, en el lado de afuera, shadows outside, outside. I am their tracker, I follow shadows, I follow the shadows of words, those words do not exist in my language, I track, I am their tracker of that which is on the side which is out, I track them outside my language, afuera de mi lingua, outside.

Speaker 2 02:34

That very much tells us what you were speaking of before, both about the different language uses, but also the hidden languages that there are around us. And your poems evoke the invisible stories that inhabit cities such as Adelaide. Your stories connect the present to the memories of the people who live here, and also connect to the memories that the city itself holds of a time when it was not a city, but was the traditional country of our First Nations people. Would you read for us next your poem, Visions of the Emerald Beyond, which is also from your collection, Adelaide, Rambling on My Mind?

Speaker 3 03:20

So this is, just to give you an idea of how this came to be, this is Visions of the Emerald Beyond. It's the title of a song by a musician of a band of the sixties and seventies and so on and so forth up until today, called Mahavishnu Orchestra. So this is the name of one of their songs and it's dedicated to my dear friend Irene Watson who is a professor of the University of South Australia whom has been so important at a certain moment when I felt alone in the universities here.

So an epigraph. We are the shadow gosh creeping back. This is a phrase by Odiru Nonukal. Deep beneath the statue of Queen Victoria is the dreaming place of the red kangaroo. The kangaroo was taken away long time ago. No inhabiting was allowed under the trees, shadows, not twisting of the torso around, not peroating, as in bacon's pictures, painfully turning about. The kangaroo was carefully fissured with scallops and other medical devices and cut off from its surrounding roots. No more a meeting place and it was used in the construction of Parliament House. In like fashion the Spaniards used the sacred temple stones to build up their own shadows. 

I picture the beauty of it every time I pass by in the tram and then I flounder and the landscape changes under my feet and I am in my way to the underground and shadows and the tram stops for a second under the pavement and every day my trip goes deeper through the layers and layers of water and sand and time. But space takes over and the eye focus first in the underlying of the grass and its charismatic formations leading me deeper and below to its interlacing of energies and water. Like a fish I swim under the concreted statues as the tram stops for a longer and wet second at Taranjanga, the place of the red kangaroo, jumping its way around the dancing shadows heart of the city, heart of us poets, seers of the shadow world.

I can feel it, I can feel it calling me. Beneath the pavement the heart beat fast and strong, bumping Akandanya superstitually into us a sense of location and belonging and redness my Mapuche heart forcing connections in me while the tram expanded stops under the pavement and I see the pounding red heart but it's not in the statue above. She is part of the concrete, too heavy an image of death, a burden dark and shallow, no roots, no love, a concreted piece standing in the middle of the city. This is not her city, I am speaking of something else, I see the shadows taking roots from Kanyanga.

If your heart flowers your eye will see it, look for it during springtime or even during winter I mean you will see the underworld coming to life. Every time you pass by Taranjanga the tram will stop and it will be there deep beneath the statue of Queen Victoria. There it is, there it is the dreaming place of the red kangaroo visions of the emerald vision the dust Taranjanga. My Mapuche heart forcing connections in me. 

Speaker 2 

Sergio, in previous episodes of this program we've interviewed Juan Garrido Salgado and Steve Brock, poets and translators with whom you collaborated along with Bicto Sifuentes Palacios and Jaime Luis Winumbia on the remarkable trilingual poetry anthology, Poetry of the Earth, which brings together poems in Mapudongong, the language of the Mapuche people of Chile, with versions in Spanish and English. It's an extraordinary work. What did that project mean to you personally and what was it like to be part of a team producing such a significant contribution to bringing the voices of indigenous people of the global south to the wider community?

Speaker 3 09:12

It was a period of a few years in which we worked, Juan and Steve and me, sometimes in my house, sometimes in Juan's place or Steve's place, and through the week we worked alone. But every weekend, Saturday afternoon or Sunday afternoon, we come together to discuss what we were doing. And it was quite an interesting relationship because the Mapuche poetry is probably one of the important practices that are taken within the domain of language and the struggle to be perceived and to express yourself through language. If you don't speak, you don't have representation. So it's a struggle the Mapuche people have been doing for a long, long, long, long time, more than 500 years. 

And it's a critical point at this moment in Chile, which is also this lack of spacing, this lack of the capacity to produce a space within yourself because you don't want it. Why? I'm white, so I don't need it. Why? Oh, well, I'm a Chilean, so I don't need it. And this is nonsense because the expansion of intelligence takes place only if you give space to the other person, which brings the novelty. So we think of ourselves as modern people, but in fact, we don't want to be modern. We are very traditional in the worst sense of the word. We don't want to change. And this is the problem. So this task of translating was quite an important one because these poets, the seven poets we included in the in the antelope are Mapuche, of Mapuche background.

But some of them are relearning Mapuche language. So for them was also an exercise of translation. And for us as well. For us to translate from the Spanish version, which was the main version, they all wrote in Spanish. Only one of them, I think, was completely bilingual. All the others were relearning the language. And we were translating from Spanish to English and the poets themselves translating from Spanish to Mapudungun. So it was an exercise where you have to consider all these things that are moving around. This is a poetry. It's a language that is moving around. It's not settled. And we don't need to be settled because settling something means to froze.

It's what Gilles Deleuze called referring to cinema. The image that is like a fossil, see, it's crystallized. It doesn't change anymore. And on the other side, Deleuze also proposed an image that was processed in movement all the time. So the time image. If you would like, I would call all this process of translating somehow a way of placing yourself within in a movement from the top of the layer down, see. So you know the earth you are stepping on and you go deeper to the heart or the foundation of your language. Not the syntaxes that follows the subject and the verb and the action and then the complements and so on. Not the horizontal movement, but the vertical movement, going down so you know what is your foundation.

You know the earth, your own earth, that you are part of the earth. And this is what we as a global civilisation avoid to do. We don't want to respect the earth. So we move from the subject that controls and attracts through an action and all the benefits, the complements of the tense. And then you have a syntaxes where the most important is the subject, the name of the person, the leader, the expert, the grammarian in the times of 500 years ago, in the times of the first grammar of the Spanish language, see. So the question is not that, it's not giving preference to the syntaxes, the orderly, lineal structure of the tense. The question is the circular, the going down in circles until you come down to the core and you know who you are.

And this is what all the creative processes help us to understand. And it is related to intercultural translation, which is the most important point today. If you don't speak another language, you should expand yourself, your intelligence and so on. So it was for me at least, and I know it was for Juan and Steve, something that helped us to understand a little bit, just a little bit, what we were doing when we wanted to come together to speak about poetry, poetry of the earth in that sense of going down into the earth. Know your ground, know your ground, go deeper, know your ground, go into what's underneath Tardanyanga and what's underneath, go all the way down and see what you could see.

Speaker 2 15:20

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. Sergio, in your poetry, you play a lot with form and style. You have vertical poems. You have poems such as, Can You See Me?, in which you invite the reader to contribute to a co-creation. And others such as, Asangre Freya or Uniberso Parallello, where some of your words shift from horizontal to vertical representation. Would you talk with us about your reflections on playing with form and style in your work?

Speaker 3 16:06

I was very lucky to get to know a poet called Ennio Moltedo, a person with an Italian name, a member of a family of refugees that went to Chile and settled in Valparaiso, main port. And he was a poet, Ennio, a magnificent poet. I've done some translations with my son Israel from Spanish to English as well, and we published it, I don't remember the place now, but here in Australia. And in his poetry, he had a line, a verse, in which he says in different ways, he points to La Linea Azul, the blue line, which is the line when you are a person in a port such as Valparaiso, you can see the sea and the line of the horizon, and it's blue. And when you travel from Valparaiso and Vina, and the city of Vina del Marque, which is the same city that changes the name, one was the main port and the other place was the place where you settle after work.

And in that travel by bus through the border, you see the ocean all the way and the line La Linea Azul. For us, portenos, La Linea Azul is the line of the poem that is drawn as an effect of nature. It's never the same, sometimes the birds that seems to be flying just over the sea, one centimeter of less than that from and never touching the sea, otherwise they would fall and die. So you see this line moving, sometimes it's driven by birds, sometimes it's the clouds, sometimes it's an effect of the sun or the appearance of the sun. But it's the sea of the eye of the poet that can capture that, and that eye is driven or it is steered by a Timonell, a driver, which is the poet, the capacity to work through language and so on.

So it's related to that idea, see, to the idea of following that line, that changes, but it's always a line. It may mean many things, it depends. So what I try to do when I sometimes fall, averse fall down, it's what is in Latin American and Chilean poetry, it's an impulse, it's a drive to follow not yourself but the hand or the fingers or the line. So in Australian times I would say when you have all these surfers that jump into the wave, who is commanding whom? The surfer or it is the wave or a company between the two of them, a coupling between the two of them. So I follow the line and sometimes I can sense the line to fall down or to draw something and so on. In Chilean poetry there is many, many poets of importance, one of them being Vicente without who brought forth the idea of creationismo.

It's related to the creative process, especially in poetry or in any arts in general. And he wrote poems like these ones, for example one of them could be the moon and the shape of the point would be a moon or it could be a tree and the shape of the point would be a tree and so on and so forth. So what I've done is just follow the line and see where does it take my hand and it's good to follow because you are avoiding commanding. See the commanding today in our society is very dangerous, everyone wants to command the other and love does not have space there. So you follow when your granddaughter is born, you follow her, you don't stop her, you don't guide her, you let her go in trust because it's being born in a place where she would have warmth, a heat that is appropriate for her at that moment, she would have the air necessary for her to live and so on.

So all these things and you trust when you have a baby that or a granddaughter as it is my case that everything will be perfect and it should be perfect. Of course it's not perfect when we interfere most of the times and this is what you do when you trust that what you are doing may be correct. When you do a class and you prepare yourself, you do all of these and then you enter the class, either you follow what you structure to the full and it's like a machine or you allow space for movement and then you have arts. That's the art and the arts are everywhere. 

The separations and the enclosing in words we do because our culture is untrustful. We don't trust others. We command them to do things and this is the actual problem. To see what we are doing, to see what you are doing, how you operate, how you relate to the other. Know the other to me, know how you operate in relation to another person and this is what we do.

Speaker 2 22:25

Sergio, many of your poems reference lines from songs, often songs from our generation, yours and my generation, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix for example, that locate us not only in time but also in the philosophical sense of belonging to an era when change felt and was possible, and that was very much a part of Chile's brief history of change and social progress during the time of the democratically elected agenda government of the early 1970s. It was a time of pride in the works of Chilean musicians, poets and artists. So what do you think about when you think about the music of the 1960s and 1970s in Chile and also beyond?

Speaker 3 23:11

I think it was a moment of great realisation that we could, as a young person, we could do things without the fears constraining us from doing them. That generation was quite an important... It was my generation, it was my friend Alejandro Perez's generation who wrote just at the beginning of this year, he published a book called Vortice Vortex, which is about that generation, the music of that generation and the great creativity of those times, which are not enclosed within those years and places, but it did happen all over the place and in a different way, in different ways. The most important thing is that today we can point to specific music, arts, practices, discourses and so on and say, well, my generation was important because it gives space to these things that now we can see and act on them.

I would rescue from that generation, which is also the generation to which Roberto Bolaño speaks on his novels, is the generation that thought about all the things that are precious to us today, what we called somehow in a positive sense our freedoms. So the poetry of the Pitnicks in the 60s, the combination between poetry and music in the Pitnicks, the narrative of the 60s of the Pitnicks, the relationship with the spiritual in all those songs and poets, it's quite an important because they all relate to this desire of us as a human race for something better. And that's why this music and this poetry is quite important to me.

Speaker 2 25:34

That's a wonderful place to leave our conversation, Sergio. Thank you so much. 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, Ciudad Dividira in 2006, Paisajes en Movimiento in 2013, Rayo de Tinevelas o El Pajaro Indonese in 2016, and Adelaide, Rambling 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 here 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.

Speaker 4 26:39 (WOMAN SINGS IN SPANISH WITH INSTRUMENTS)

¿Qué mi adado tanto? Me dío el corazón? ¿Qué ajítas su marjo? Cuando ve el verfuto? ¿De hacer ebrumano? Cuando miro al bueno? ¿Tantejos? ¿De el mado? Cuando miro el fondo? ¿De tus gojos? ¿Claros? Gracias a la vida? ¿Qué mi adado tanto? Me adado la marjada? ¿De mi espex? ¿Clanzados? ¿Cóme yo sanduve? ¿Ciudade? ¿Ci charcos? ¿Vaya? ¿Ci que sierdos? ¿Montañaz? ¿Ciános? ¿Ira casa tu ya? ¿Tuca e tu patio? Gracias a la vida? ¿Qué mi adado tanto? ¿Me adado la rista? ¿Me adado el yanto? ¿A sío de stingo? ¿Villa de que brando? ¿Los dos materiales? ¿Qué por man mi canto? ¿Y el canto de ustedes? ¿Qué es mi propio canto? ¿Y el canto de todo? ¿Qué es mi smo canto? Gracias a la vida?

Speaker 1 29:04

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Speaker 2 29:15

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