On Translating bruno darío
airsickness does not seek to “cure” this condition, but instead teaches us to stare our fate in the face—and to laugh in, to spit on, to kiss this face.
BY Kit Schluter
By the time of his death at twenty-nine from brain cancer, bruno darío (1993-2022)—always fully lowercase—had already left a surprising and indelible mark on Mexican poetry with Lantana; or, the indissoluble exhalation, a trilogy comprised of the three full-length books he published in his lifetime: feast, fright; airsickness; and raze.
By turns sardonic and lyrical, amorous and irreverent, Lantana centers loosely on the relationship of a young man (the Inconsolable) and an older woman who unexpectedly takes her own life (Lantana/Anfitriona). Across the three books, darío moves between registers and genres: soliloquies from people, places, and things; the Inconsolable’s notes, poems, and letters; the discourses of Lantana’s decomposing corpse as gravity pulls her deeper into the soil.
The poems included here are examples of the Inconsolable’s letters from airsickness. Penned to various figures in his life, the letters are philosophical, nasty, funny, disaffected—full of both life and death. They overflow with wordplay and experiments that rub up against the writer’s frank attempt to articulate a clear, critical vision of contemporary life.
Once, while we were editing these translations together, I asked bruno what the concept of “airsickness” meant to him. He said it had to do with the particular condition of alienation inherent to our times. He provided an example: the very air we breathe is not only increasingly polluted with carcinogens, but it also courses with invisible cellular and Wi-Fi signals pumped out of the gadgets that sever our connections to each other as humans, as animals. It is a sickness carried, too, by the particles of the last breaths of all those who die every day in disappearances, femicides, and capital-fueled genocide. It is pervasive. I wonder: can it be cured?
airsickness does not seek to “cure” this condition, but instead teaches us to stare our fate in the face—and to laugh in, to spit on, to kiss this face. Lantana, on the whole, is like nothing else I have ever read, and is among my very favorite works of Latin American literature in the new millennium.
Kit Schluter wrote Cartoons (City Lights, 2024) and translated His Name Was Death by Rafael Bernal (New Directions, 2022). He lives in Mexico City and coordinates design at Nightboat Books.