coldhearted scientist وداد

…that I spent days translating when I should have been doing any number of things.

The post-human.
The critique of nationalist literary histories.
The attempt to locate origins in what has been lost.
The fact that that is the game nationalist literary histories play, appropriating those origins for the national project.
We are taught to identify with that appropriation.
The evidence of those origins — that we know are not the reified origin of national literary histories — are nonetheless all around us, and resist nationalist appropriation (Vallejo knew it, too).
The dislocated feeling of identifying with a landscape filled with signs of this unknowable and unrecuperable past.
Writing about these things now, in globalization and the end of the nation-state.
Ortega speaks of this poetry as “emanating from a wound in the Spanish language” but it is more properly a gap in [the Peruvian gestalt].
Roxosol, the title, refers to the sun in a Golden Age poem but also to the Incan sun.
Inkarrí is here that awareness of the older world, lost to us, but whose traces are still visible.
The speaker is a national subject dissolving.
The poem insists on place, situatedness, but outside the narration of nation. Consciousness of this place means moving beyond binaries like civilization and barbarism, present and past, but also human and non-human.

…I wonder if this has potential, or is good.

Axé.