The Azure Cloister

“[…] stubbornly I have searched for such a place / that is beyond the light, beyond the darkness,” the Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli writes in “The Good Change,” one of the poems selected and translated by the late Karl Maurer for The Azure Cloister. Belli’s work seeks the limits of human experience in forms that summon “the bodies in which we dwell,” sometimes with what Maurer calls the “tortuous Gongoresque syntax” of the Spanish Baroque, and in evocations of the timeless, abject, and ineffable. In “The Crumbs of the Sumerian King,” ancient barley “is suddenly today touched by my fingers.” In “Poem” (“Our love”), the lovers’ eyes continue to watch each other after death, “not like two stars, but like one star.” In a poem about car engines (“Transmission”), the poet seeks “to engear myself / with the invisible wheel of the stars […]” 

If Belli’s repetition of words and images—“bolus,” “hare-lip,” “foetus,” “commensal”—can heighten a native pessimism (“This wolf ’s mouth of a world, that bristles even / with a hare-lip”), he draws back from outright nihilism to show tenderness for the tiny creatures “a gigantic human” accidentally crushes in the grass, for Giovanni Donato da Montorfano (“supremest of unnoticed creatures”), who painted the fresco opposite Leonardo’s The Last Supper, and for Belli’s disabled brother Alfonso, whom he looked after when their mother died. 

Belli writes that Alfonso “has been the reason I perceive the human condition as disabled,” and contemplates his brother’s experiences: “the severe stocks keeping you a vassal.” While Maurer’s adherence to Belli’s forms can lead to English phrasing that summons different literary traditions from Belli’s Spanish—“At dawn already me they bid assist” sounds, to my ear, Victorian—his rendering of poems like “Memory of My Brother” glow with familial love and fraternal devotion:

   […] I take the measurements at last
of your pure square, pure circle, purest world.