Maqroll's Prayer and Other Poems

The prose poem “Solitude,” from Álvaro Mutis’s Maqroll’s Prayer and Other Poems, in translation by Chris Andrews, Edith Grossman, and Alastair Reid, begins:

In the middle of the jungle, in the darkest night of the great trees, surrounded by a humid silence hovering over the huge leaves of the wild banana tree, the Gaviero came to know the fear of his most secret wretchedness, the terror of a great emptiness that had pursued him through years crowded with stories and landscapes.

The Gaviero, the central character in Mutis’s work, has dementia, which has led him, after a lifetime of adventure, to experience “unnamable fear.” The sense of finding oneself on the edge between life and death is one of the main themes in this volume, which includes poems written between 1948 and 1988, here in translation for the first time.

Andrews, Grossman, and Reid have done an incredible job rendering the complexity of Mutis’s poetry into English, maintaining the vivid imagery and rhythmic cadences of the original. In the first stanza of “The Map,” the translation’s consonance of “s” sounds captures well the soundscape of the original:

A scarlet horseman
gallops across the steppes.
His sabre reaches to
the baffled sun,
which waits for him, spread over
a bay bathed in
a tepid silence.

Mutis describes, in rich sensory detail, deterioration—both human and environmental—while also giving voice to a hope for renewal and rebirth. Opposing forces, like light and dark, are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent: “The fitful glow of that lamp / every night at nightfall / takes on the dark.” These lines convey how darkness affects the emotional state of the Gaviero, who draws comfort from “the stubborn vigilance / of that defeated lamp” while contemplating his own mortality. The poem ends by connecting “the memory” of the lamp’s “sheer persistence” to the way “certain words / find the appointed place” in a poem, “fulfilling the ineffable / design of the gods.”