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The 10 best poems by Roberto Bolaño

The 10 best poems by Roberto Bolaño

March 27, 2024

Roberto Bolaño (1953 - 2003) is one of the best-known Chilean literary figures of the last fifty years.

This well-known writer and poet, who died in 2003, is especially recognized for having produced novels such as "Distant Star" or "The Wild Detectives". He is also known for being one of the main founders of the infrarrealist movement, which sought the free expression of one's vital position independently of the conventions and limits imposed by society.

The path of this author, although perhaps received greater recognition for his novels, would begin with the hand of his lyrical works, mainly poems in which the author expressed his emotions and thoughts on a wide variety of topics. And in order to observe and deepen their way of seeing things, in this article we present a brief selection of Roberto Bolaño's poems .


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Ten poems by Roberto Bolaño

Then we leave you with a dozen of the poetic works of Roberto Bolaño, who speak to us about subjects as diverse as love, poetry or death, from a point of view that is sometimes tragic.

1. Romantic dogs

At that time I was twenty years old and I was crazy. He had lost a country but had won a dream. And if he had that dream, the rest did not matter. Neither work nor pray, nor study at dawn with romantic dogs. And the dream lived in the emptiness of my spirit.

A room of wood, in twilight, in one of the lungs of the tropics. And sometimes I would go back inside myself and visit the dream: statue immortalized in liquid thoughts, a white worm writhing in love.


A love runaway. A dream within a dream. And the nightmare told me: you will grow. You will leave behind the images of pain and labyrinth and you will forget. But at that time grow might be a crime. I'm here, I said, with the romantic dogs and here I'm going to stay.

This poem, published in the book of the same name, tells us about youth and madness and lack of control of the passions with which it is usually associated. We also see a possible reference to the fall of Chile in the hands of Pinochet and his emigration to Mexico.

2. Musa

She was more beautiful than the sun and I was not yet sixteen. Twenty-four have passed and continue by my side. Sometimes I see her walking on the mountains: she is the guardian angel of our prayers. It is the dream that returns with the promise and the whistle. The whistle that calls us and that loses us. In their eyes I see the faces of all my lost loves.


Ah, Musa, protect me, I tell you, in the terrible days of incessant adventure. Never get away from Me. Take care of my steps and the steps of my son Lautaro. Let me feel the tip of your fingers again on my back, pushing me, when everything is dark, when everything is lost. Let me hear the whistle again.

I am your faithful lover although sometimes the dream separates me from you. You are also the queen of dreams. My friendship you have every day and someday your friendship will pick me up from the wasteland of oblivion. Well, even if you come when I go in the background we are inseparable friends.

Musa, wherever I go you go. I saw you in the hospitals and in the line of political prisoners. I saw you in the terrible eyes of Edna Lieberman and in the alleys of the gunmen. And you always protected me! In the defeat and in the scratch.

In sick relationships and cruelty, you were always with me. And even if the years go by and Roberto Bolaño de la Alameda and the Libreria de Cristal are transformed, paralyze, become stupider and older you will remain just as beautiful. More than the sun and the stars.

Musa, wherever you go, I go. I follow your radiant wake through the long night. No matter the years or the disease. Not caring about the pain or the effort that I have to do to follow you. Because with you I can cross the great desolate spaces and I will always find the door that will return me to the Chimera, because you are with me, Musa, more beautiful than the sun and more beautiful than the stars.

The author speaks to us in this poem of his poetic inspiration, his muse, seeing it in different spheres and contexts.

3. Rain

It rains and you say it's as if the clouds are crying. Then you cover your mouth and hurry up. As if those squalid clouds cried? Impossible. But then, where does that rage, that desperation that will take us all to the devil?

Nature hides some of its procedures in the Mystery, its half brother. So this afternoon that you consider similar to an evening of the end of the world sooner than you think will seem only a melancholic afternoon, an afternoon of loneliness lost in memory: the mirror of Nature.

Or else you will forget it.Neither the rain, nor the crying, nor your footsteps that resonate in the path of the cliff matter, now you can cry and let your image is diluted in the windshield of cars parked along the promenade. But you can not lose yourself.

This poetry reflects a feeling of strangeness, sadness, fear and helplessness derived from observing the rain, which also symbolizes pain and tears. This is an element of frequent appearance in the work of the author that also tends to use as a point of union between the real and the unreal.

4. Strange mannequin

Strange mannequin from a Metro store, what a way to observe me and to feel myself beyond any bridge, looking at the ocean or a huge lake, as if he expected adventure and love. And a girl scream in the middle of the night can convince me of the utility of my face or the instants are veiled, hot red copper plates the memory of love refusing three times for the sake of another kind of love. And so we harden ourselves without abandoning the aviary, devaluing ourselves, or we go back to a tiny house where a woman sits in the kitchen waiting for us.

Strange mannequin from a Metro store, what a way to communicate with me, single and violent, and to feel beyond anything. You only offer me buttocks and breasts, platinum stars and sparkling sexes. Do not make me cry in the orange train, or on the escalators, or suddenly leaving for March, or when you imagine, if you imagine, my steps as an absolute veteran again dancing through the gorges.

Strange mannequin from a Metro store, as well as the sun and the shadows of the skyscrapers tilts, you will bow your hands; Just as the colors and colored lights go out, your eyes will go out. Who will change your clothes then? I know who will change your clothes then.

This poem, in which the author talks with a mannequin in a subway shop, speaks of a feeling of emptiness and loneliness, of the search for sexual pleasure as an escape route and of the progressive turning off of illusion.

The great Roberto Bolaño, in his office.

5. The ghost of Edna Lieberman

They visit you in the darkest hour all your lost loves. The dirt road that led to the asylum unfolds again like the eyes of Edna Lieberman, as only her eyes could rise above the cities and shine.

And the eyes of Edna shine again for you behind the hoop of fire that used to be the dirt road, the path you traveled through the night, back and forth, again and again, looking for it or perhaps looking for your shadow.

And you wake up silently and Edna's eyes are there. Between the moon and the hoop of fire, reading your favorite Mexican poets. And Gilberto Owen, did you read it ?, your lips say without sound, says your breathing and your blood that circulates like the light of a lighthouse.

But your eyes are the beacon that crosses your silence. His eyes that are like the ideal geography book: the maps of the pure nightmare. And your blood illuminates the shelves with books, the chairs with books, the floor full of stacked books.

But Edna's eyes only seek you. His eyes are the most wanted book. Too late you have understood, but it does not matter. In the dream you shake your hands again, and you do not ask for anything anymore.

This poem tells us about Edna Lieberman, a woman whose author was deeply in love but whose relationship broke soon. Despite this, he would remember it often, appearing in a large number of works by the author.

6. Godzilla in Mexico

Take care of this, my son: the bombs were falling on Mexico City but nobody noticed. The air carried the poison through the streets and open windows. You had just finished eating and you saw cartoons on TV. I read in the next room when I knew we were going to die.

Despite the dizziness and nausea I crawled to the dining room and found you on the floor.

We hug. You asked me what was going on and I did not say that we were on the death program but that we were going to start a trip, one more, together, and that you were not afraid. When he left, death did not even close our eyes. What are we? You asked me a week or a year later, ants, bees, wrong figures in the great rotten soup of chance? We are human beings, my son, almost birds, public heroes and secrets.

This brief problem reflects quite clearly how the author works on the subject of death and fear and fear of it (in the context of a bombing), as well as the ease with which it can reach us. It also gives us a brief reflection on the issue of identity, who we are in a society that is increasingly individualistic but in which the person is less considered as such.

7. Teach me how to dance

Teach me to dance, to move my hands between the cotton of the clouds, to stretch my legs trapped by your legs, to drive a motorcycle through the sand, to pedal on a bicycle under malls of imagination, to stay still as a bronze statue, to stay motionless smoking Delicates in ntra. corner.

The blue reflectors of the room will show my face, dripping with mascara and scratches, you will see a constellation of tears on my cheeks, I will run away.

Teach me to stick my body to your wounds, teach me to hold your heart a little while in my hand, to open my legs as the flowers open to the wind for themselves, for the dew of the afternoon. Teach me to dance, tonight I want to follow the beat, open the doors of the roof, mourn in your solitude while from above we look at cars, trucks, highways full of police and burning machines.

Teach me to open my legs and tuck it in, contain my hysteria inside your eyes. Caress my hair and my fear with your lips that have cursed so much, so sustained shadow. Teach me to sleep, this is the end.

This poem is the request of someone terrified, who is afraid but wants to live free, and who asks his companion to teach him to live freely, to release her and make love to her in order to find peace.

8. Sunrise

Believe me, I'm in the middle of my room waiting for it to rain. I am alone. I do not mind finishing my poem or not. I wait for the rain, drinking coffee and looking out the window at a beautiful landscape of interior patios, with clothes hanging and still, silent marble clothes in the city, where there is no wind and in the distance you can only hear the hum of a color television , observed by a family that also, at this time, drinks coffee gathered around a table.

Believe me: the yellow plastic tables unfold to the horizon line and beyond: to the suburbs where they build apartment buildings, and a 16-year-old boy sitting on red bricks watches the movement of the machines.

The sky in the boy's hour is a huge hollow screw with which the breeze plays. And the boy plays with ideas. With ideas and scenes stopped. Immobility is a hard transparent haze that comes out of your eyes.

Believe me: it is not love that is going to come,

but the beauty with its stole of dead albs.

This poem makes a reference to the arrival of the light of the Sun in the dawn, the stillness the awakening of the ideas, although it also makes reference to the prediction that something bad may come later.

9. Palingenesis

I was talking to Archibald MacLeish at the bar "Los Marinos" in Barceloneta when I saw her appear, a plaster statue trudging over the cobblestones. My interlocutor also saw her and sent a waiter to look for her. During the first minutes she did not say a word. MacLeish ordered consommé and tapas of Mariscos, country bread with tomato and oil, and San Miguel beer.

I settled for an infusion of chamomile and slices of wholemeal bread. He had to take care of me, I said. Then she decided to speak: the barbarians advance, she whispered melodiously, a warp mass, pregnant with howls and oaths, a long night of love to illuminate the marriage of muscles and fat.

Then his voice died down and he dedicated himself to eating the food. A hungry and beautiful woman, MacLeish said, an irresistible temptation for two poets, albeit from different languages, from the same untamed New World. I gave him the reason without understanding all his words and I closed my eyes. When I woke MacLeish he was gone. The statue was there, on the street, its remains scattered among the uneven sidewalk and the old cobblestones. The sky, hours before blue, had turned black as an insurmountable rancor.

It's going to rain, said a barefoot child, trembling for no apparent reason. We looked at each other for a while: with his finger he indicated the pieces of plaster on the floor. Snow, he said. Do not tremble, I answered, nothing will happen, the nightmare, although close, has passed without touching.

This poem, whose title refers to the property of regenerating or reborn once apparently dead, shows us how the poet dreams of the advance of barbarism and intolerance, which end up destroying beauty in convulsive times.

10. Hope

The clouds are forked. The dark opens, pale furrow in the sky. That which comes from the bottom is the sun. The interior of the clouds, before absolute, shines like a crystallized boy. Roads covered with branches, wet leaves, footprints.

I have remained quiet during the storm and now reality opens up. The wind drags groups of clouds in different directions. I thank heaven for making love with the women I've loved. Come from the dark, pale furrow

the days as boys walkers.

This poem gives an account of hope, of being able to resist and overcome adversity in order to see the light again.


Roberto Bolaño Interview [English Subtitles] (March 2024).


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