Two Poems

Jaime Saenz (trans. Ted Dodson & Kit Schluter)

This indispensable bilingual edition contains two important poems by Jaime Saenz, Bolivia’s lodestone, lodestar and poèt maudit: “The Cold,” in its complete, landmark translation by the poet Kit Schluter; and “Death at the Very Touch,” never before available in English and translated by the poet Ted Dodson. With Blakean intimacy, these two sequences trace a double path through life and death, a cosmic and compact universal guide.

'The figure of the poet-mystic, derelict-saint, cosmic-mariner, endures for good reason: when you meet them on the page, you already know them. You already know what they say is true. Just so, Jaime Saenz speaks from an impossible yet ultrareal angle of perception, an ecstatic position of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion: absolute cold, degree zero. Line by line, degree by degree, these poems advance into the supercooled heart of things, at once spare, marvelous and exactly correct as a spring branch that finds a way to bend and bear one more drop of ice, as ice finds a way to holds on to itself and bear one more drop of light. Friendly with the dead as with the stars, this song unfurls. Lonely as the metal thread of night.'- Joyelle McSweeney