Peruvian poetry in Argentina: a movement that unites tradition and new voices

New authors, women, the unusual, the traditional figures. Peruvian poets are at the heart of an intense movement in Argentina. which is centered on publishing and extends to participation in festivals, reading series, and seminars . The exchanges and mutual influences between Peruvians and Argentines have precedents in other periods, but in the present, they take on unprecedented importance and dissemination.

The work and thought of Mario Montalbetti (1953) are a focal point of this phenomenon. This writer and university professor, with a doctorate from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), defines himself as "a linguist who writes poems." He has published nine books of poetry and essays in Argentina since 2017, and in September, Caleta Olivia will publish his tenth, Perro negro . Five of these titles appeared under the N Direccións imprint, which also co-published the poetry collected in Lejos de mí decirles (Lejos de mí decirles, 2023) with Mansalva.

In June, during his last visit to Buenos Aires, Montalbetti gave a seminar to a packed Malba auditorium, entitled "Why is it so difficult to read a poem? " "In Latin America, our first gesture of independence is not being Spanish, and that also happens with language. There's a South American Spanish, the accents are different, but deep down, we understand each other because we use the language in the same way," Montalbetti said in a public interview with editor Gerardo Jorge in the museum's auditorium.

Carmen Ollé (1947) has just received the José Donoso Ibero-American Prize for Literature in Chile, one of the most important on the continent. Before that, she participated in the closing reading of the last International Poetry Festival at the Buenos Aires Book Fair . Her presence was also motivated by the presentation of Noches de adrenalina ( Nights of Adrenaline), a benchmark title in contemporary Latin American poetry. Libros de Tierra Firme, José Luis Mangieri's publishing house, first published the book in Argentina in 1994, and Nebliplateada reissued it last March.

Nights of Adrenaline was released in Peru in 1981 and made an impact on a scene where women's voices were relegated . The female voice that delivered the poems, a "green lyric of underdeveloped beauty" set between Lima and Paris, casually and caustically incorporated themes of sexuality, eroticism, and criticism of Western culture. Ollé was a member of Hora Zero, an avant-garde group in her country, and developed a distinguished career within the women's and writers' movement.

Blanca Varela (1926–2009) was an exceptional name in the preceding panorama, due to her status as a woman and the scope of her work. Caleta Olivia and Gog & Magog partnered in 2023 to publish her complete poetry in Buenos Aires, under the title Las cosas que digo son dudas (The Things I Say Are True ). A reference of the generation of the 50s, Varela was introduced to Argentina in the early 1980s by the group Ultimo Reino (The Last Kingdom) , which dedicated a dossier to her in its magazine. The rise of Peruvian poetry in Argentina updates a circuit that also has its history.

“In Peru, we all write with César Vallejo breathing down our necks,” Montalbetti said at the Malba, referring to the author of Trilce . However, he clarified that his development matured through reading the poets of the Generation of the 1960s. “Three notable names in the poetry of that decade, because they radically changed the course of reading, were Antonio Cisneros, Rodolfo Hinostroza, and Enrique Verástegui,” observes Mario Arteca, one of the Argentine poets most attentive to the Peruvian tradition.

The stay of the surrealist poet Enrique Molina in Lima was the origin of multiple contacts between Peruvian and Argentine writers towards the mid-50s. In 1964, in Buenos Aires, the magazine Zona de la poesía americana published a dossier of new authors with poems by Javier Heraud (1942–1963), who fell in combat as a member of a guerrilla organization, and Lola Thorne (1931–1991), who lived for a few years in Argentina as a cultural attaché at the Peruvian embassy and partner of the writer Miguel Brascó.

“ In the 1960s, Peruvian poetry entered a phase marked by conversational writing , more direct and related to political and social themes, with names like César Calvo, Marco Martos, and Mirko Lauer, among others . Cisneros, with his Canto ceremonial contra un oso hormiguero (Ceremonial Song Against an Anteater ) from 1968, also published that year in Argentina by the Centro Editor de América Latina; Hinostroza with Contra natura (Contra Natura) from 1970, and Verástegui with En los extramuros del mundo (In the Extramurs of the World) from 1971, brought different influences from English-language poetry to direct issues of the popular and added a picture of explosive renewal of speech, even penetrating our own Argentine poetry,” explains Arteca.

The Book of Sounds. 14 Poets of Peru (1988), an anthology by Reynaldo Jiménez published by Ultimo Reino, marked another milestone. Born in Lima in 1959, Jiménez has lived in Buenos Aires since childhood ; his family ties to Peru also informed his initiation into poetry, as the nephew of the poet, essayist, and translator Javier Sologuren (1921–2004).

“I used to travel to Peru during the summers and spend months there,” says Reynaldo Jiménez. “I became friends with Blanca Varela and met Emilio Westphalen, another great poet. They introduced me to authors like Alejandro Romualdo and Carlos Germán Belli and helped me define the anthology, which focused on the first half of the 20th century. At the time the book was published, Peruvian poetry was unknown in Argentina, and I continued the project.” In 2005, Jiménez reissued the anthology, revised and expanded to include 37 poets, through his Tsé Tsé imprint, where he also published other notable Peruvians such as Roger Santiváñez and José Morales Saravia .

Magazines were another outlet . In September 1981, Xul introduced “four brand-new Peruvians,” among them a then-unknown Mario Montalbetti. Another of the authors included then was Carlos López Degregori , whose Portraits of a Fallen Splendor has just been reissued by La Primera Vértebra, a Latin American poetry publisher with offices in Argentina and Peru.

Diario de Poesía , the quarterly journal edited by Daniel Samoilovich, published, among other collections, the dossier Twenty Poets of Peru (1994). Among other authors was Rocío Silva Santisteban (1963), later invited to the Rosario Poetry Festival. Dedicated to political activity in recent years, she was elected to Congress in 2020 for the Broad Front for Justice, Life and Liberty, a center-left coalition.

Three years earlier , Diario de Poesía had revived the work of Luis Hernández (1941–1977), a cult author, for the first time in Argentina . The poet's confused death at the Santos Lugares station on the San Martín railway, suspected of being suicide, and above all, his work, which blends cultured references with street phrases, contributed to his myth. So did the anecdotes: when asked if he saw a contradiction between his interest in poetry and his profession as a doctor, he replied: "I swear by Apollo, god of medicine and poetry, that I don't. It's the same oath."

In 2022, Nebliplateada revived Hernández's work with the publication of Vox horrísona, a compilation of three books published during his lifetime and unpublished texts that remained in notebooks. “One of the things he sought with poetry and medicine was to combat the pain of existence. One imagines that a doctor might prescribe an antibiotic, but also reading, for example, The Great Gatsby , to cure a certain ailment, since, as Pascal said, an illness is first an illness of the soul,” wrote Fabián Casas in the prologue.

The publishing house Bajo la luna was a pioneer in the current dissemination of Peruvian poetry with the publication of La piedra alada (2009) and Animal de invierno y otros 65 poemas sobre la naturaleza y sus poemas (2019), both by José Watanabe (1946–2007), another reference author.

Tilsa Otta (Lima, 1982) has been a recurring presence on the poetry scene since her invitation to the Rosario Poetry Festival in 2009. Her lyrical register is accentuated by irony, as in “A veces me faltan palabras”: “if you find them/ give me notice/ then I will be able to tell you/ some pending things/ if you feed me/ if you provide for me/ how much I could tell you”. A narrator, poet and audiovisual director, she published in Argentina My Poison Girl in the Garden of Ballads of Memory (Neutrinos, 2021), Antimatter or the Great Poem Accelerator (Neutrinos, 2022), Two Small Islands Staring at Each Other (Mansalva, 2023) and Life Has Already Surpassed Writing (Caleta Olivia, 2023).

Also participating in the last Poetry Festival at the Buenos Aires Book Fair were Roxana Crisólogo Correa (1966), a poet who lives between Lima and Helsinki and thinks of her texts as “a journey through global politics, from below, underground,” and Teresa Cabrera Espinoza (1981), who this year published Villa riqueza through Eloísa Cartonera.

Crisólogo Correa presented Dónde Deja Tanto Noise , published by Gog & Magog. The book was “an exercise in decolonizing myself from the patriarchal and academic structures from which poetry is sought,” as the author explained, and hence the use of voices of popular figures: artisans, seamstresses, candy vendors—as opposed to the figure of a professor—and a butcher, like her father, who “left early to pick up the meat that arrived from Argentina.”

Crisólogo Correa's texts unfold situations in Berlin and other European settings in a process where strangeness reinforces the identity of one's origins: "Every day I become Peruvian/ I cook convinced that dedicating oneself/ to gastronomy is salvation." Dónde dejar tanto ruido (Where to Leave So Much Noise) is emerging as a reference book for new Latin American poetry and Peruvian culture in Argentina and offers a voice of hope in a bleak context: "We have lost everything and that's why we're going to celebrate/ that there's still something hidden in the water/ microscopic and cellular/ something that shines with blindfolded eyes/ occupying ground ahead like a mountain range."