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Ennio Moltedo
Translated from the Spanish by Marguerite Feitlowitz

Someone, perhaps on another page, will say, what happened to the light, to the orange sphere suspended in a play of verticals high on an urban hill—the one that pirates hacked to pieces and buried in the dirt—and to you, ever on the shore, fingers tangled on the old keyboard, and above, the invisible hulking wind grabbing leaves and birds.

Someone will say, it’s time to return to the space where drops hung suspended as the sun passed, in the empty blue.

I believe in death, in death’s eternal pulse, and I believe our moment will come again when the sea regains its color and the sphere lights up, emblazons the hilltop, and celebrates the dignity—this time—of the sick at heart.

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Color photograph of Ennio Moltedo

Ennio Moltedo (1931–2012) spent his life in the small Chilean coastal cities of Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. Born to Genoese immigrants, he is a poet of the New World Mediterranean: inspired, chastened, and challenged by the ancients, and in conversation with his contemporaries, including Huidobro, Girondo, Neruda, and de Rokha. A revered “poet’s poet,” he published eight individual collections of poetry, as well as an anthology of Romanian poetry co-translated with Neruda, and a chronicle of Neruda’s life (Neruda: poeta del cerro Florida). Longtime director of the University of Valparaíso Press, Moltedo also wrote criticism, journalism, and text for books of visual art and cartoons.

Headshot of Marguerite Feitlowitz

Marguerite Feitlowitz’s newest book-length translations are Night, by Ennio Moltedo, a collection of 113 prosepoems written during and against the Pinochet dictatorship (supported by an NEAFellowship and published byWorld Poetry Books, 2023), and Small Bibles for Bad Times: Selected Prose and Poetry by French Holocaust writer Liliane Atlan (2021); and Pillar of Salt: An Autobiography with Nineteen Erotic Sonnets, by Salvador Novo (2014). She also published two volumes of plays by Griselda Gambaro (Argentina). I’m the author of A LEXICON OF TERROR: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture, a New York Times NotableBook and Notable paperback, and a Finalist for PEN-L.L. Winship Prize. This book was also published in Argentina.

Her fiction, essays, translation, and writings on visual art and theatre have appeared in ACM, Asymptote, BOMB, Catapult, DELOS, Dissent, The Nation, Les Temps Modernes, el viejo topo, among other journals and anthologies. From 2002-2023, she taughtLiterature and Literary Translation at Bennington College, where she founded and directed “Bennington Translates,” a multi-disciplinary initiative spanning literary to humanitarian translation with a focus on forced displacement, migration, and linguistic justice.

Among her awards and fellowships, are two Fulbrights to Argentina, a fellowship to the Bunting Institute (now called the Radcliffe Institute), and a Harvard Faculty Research Grant.

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Night
World Poetry Books

New York, New York

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“Ennio Moltedo, translated now for the first time by the daring mind of Marguerite Feitlowitz, conveys the Chilean night in all its linguistic, political, and cultural meanings: darkness, affliction, and absence of ethics or reason: the enduring wounds of Chile’s dictatorship. In Night we see how land and military are irrevocably intertwined: ‘If you put your ear to the naked earth, you will precisely hear the murderers’ names.’ And indeed, these same murderers, or, ‘authorities,’ ask the people to ‘renew their relationship with the sea,’ the sea which the narrator has been dumped into. ‘Let’s search for a bit of truth amid towers of corpses,’ writes Moltedo. In this quest for clarity amid darkness, Moltedo’s poems reverberate with the force of a language writing its way out of the psychological shackles of the state.”
—Daniel Borzutzky

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